Sherwood Nation: a novel

by Benjamin Parzybok

  He skimmed through the various headings, which included items from farms to outhouses, water ceremonies to weapon exchange, and finally he paused on “what system of government is this?”

  Sherwood is a non-democratic temporary micro-government whose intent is to dissolve upon the cessation of the drought and drought conditions. It is a rational, intelligent, fast-acting emergency government for extreme times. We felt we could do better than the existing power structures and we believe that we have been proven right. Our citizens enjoy a substantially lower crime rate, more active government participation, and higher levels of health. Our children receive better schooling and our volunteer-run public works projects have no equal. While currently you cannot choose who is in control or what programs are run, we actively solicit your advice. Pending less severe circumstances we will continue to evaluate our philosophy. Why not enlist as a Green Ranger, water carrier, or in one of our many other positions and take an active role in this historic government?

  The mayor paced the living room, circling the couch where Christopher sat, like a shark around a boat.

  “What’s to stop Sherwood from expanding again tomorrow?” Christopher said.

  The mayor went to the window and stared, Sherwood’s front line stood radically closer to him now. He could clearly see it, like a tidal wave, consuming everything before it. “The Southeast is making a plea for her to take over there. They’re throwing a rally today in order to get on the news. Fucking asking for a dictatorship!” The mayor wanted to crush her, to kill her. Without her, Sherwood would die. Governments need leaders, dictatorships need them absolutely. “I can’t take control here. I need people loyal to me. Herr Commander, in his infinite wisdom, could go in there now and stop her, maybe, but who knows what he wants. Who do I have loyal to me?”

  “You have me.”

  “Yes. Yes, love.” The mayor turned to see if there was any facetiousness in Christopher’s expression, but he stared toward the dark TV. “We implemented some of her programs and some of our own, but we’re losing the popular war. And now we’re losing the land war.” He wondered how long it would be before some crazy fuck slipped past his faltering police force and put a bullet in him. Some fanatical Sherwoodian acolyte who wanted to prove himself to her.

  Christopher remembered his original suggestion from when she had just come to power. That they should pull up with a couple of tanks and take her out. He feared the mayor was thinking this now, letting the options and possibilities of it rattle around his mind. He grimaced and knew that if he didn’t say it out loud it would turn and rot and fester there, the violence replaying in a hundred different fashions, the mayor hitting this game’s virtual reset button so that he could play it out again and again.

  “So?” Christopher said. “What will you do?”

  The mayor made a sound like a bear and slammed his fist on the sliding glass door, pulling the punch at the last second. The door thudded satisfyingly.

  Christopher knew the unsaid topic was already in discussion between them then. They were discussing it and the irony pained him, that the mayor had taken up his early, naive suggestion while he now loathed the idea. There was a time some years ago where the roles of Maid Marian and Mayor Bartlett could have been switched. When the mayor was idealistic and charming and ambitious, when he could have run his own country and the people would have loved him. Before running a city had stifled him and tempered the idealism and made them both soft. Christopher knew that once the mayor had come to power he’d immediately begun to worry about losing it. It had altered them both. Power being that which wraps one in a blanket of security and specialness, boosting ego and privilege, pride and desire. He knew at times it became all consuming for the mayor, constantly reevaluating his position, seeing where he stood in relation to others. They could be happy without it, he thought, they could go back, but he wasn’t sure he could convince the mayor of such. The mayor continually made micro-adjustments to guarantee his position; favors granted to those with means, deals arranged with those with sway.

  “What if,” Christopher said, “what if you offered to join her? What if the city combined with Sherwood? With the borders down you could joint rule. Perhaps she could—” Christopher was unsure how power could be shared and this, he thought, was the crux of it. “You could adopt her working policies, and obviously your working policies, and the entire city could be run that way. You’re not that different, right?” He searched his mind for some formation that made sense and finally an example from history came to him. “The Romans, they had two consuls, one for east and one for west? Similar policies and shared power?”

  For a long time the mayor stood with his hands pressed against the glass door looking out over their balcony and the city beyond and did not move.

  “She would not have me. They would not have me. She invaded! I was elected and she invaded.”

  “What will you do then?”

  “I will go in and get her,” the mayor said. “The Guard and I will. I have talked to Commander Aachen. She is a terrorist and a criminal. She will go to jail and there will be a trial.”

  “If she is not killed.”

  “We will try not to kill her.”

  “Don’t you think it’s too late? To call her a criminal? She’s been operating for what, nine weeks? Three months? In the minds of the citizens of this city, there would be few that think of her as a criminal now.”

  “Nevertheless.” The mayor stood still, his head pressed against the glass, pointed toward Sherwood.

  “And how do you expect it to play out?”

  “I expect to assume control of the entire city. She’ll go to prison. There will be chaos until we clarify the history of Sherwood, call out her crimes. Then favor will come back to us. After we have told our story and reestablished control, most will remember it only as a bad dream. They’ll remember what we tell them to remember. That it was a sad, desperate period in the history of our city.”

  “If you do not kill her.”

  “We will try not to kill her.”

  “You want her to die.”

  “I will not let my feelings get in the way of what must be done.”

  “She’d become a martyr. There would be riots. The idea of her would become even more powerful.”

  “I’m willing to take that risk. But you overestimate her, Christopher. She’s a coffee barista–cum-dictator. Besides, I don’t care about martyrs. I care about running the city.”

  She felt sore from biking the entire day, up and down nearly every street in her new territory. Bea and her Rangers had followed along doggedly and Bea had been anxious with the tension of traveling through uncatalogued neighborhoods where they had no sense of the danger level. But these were her people now, and Renee wanted them to know she was theirs. Maid Marian belonged to everybody. She was their prize, their hope. She was their own personal army. Girls and boys between the ages of six and sixteen fell in behind her all day and followed along. People pumped her hand and gushed. She was bringing water and peace and a new way of life, she was welcoming them as citizens to the promised land.

  She developed a honed sense of their expectations. With every Maid Marian response, with her eyes and speech, each action was a promise to those expectations.

  But back at HQ she felt lost inside the cavernous personality of Maid Marian. She and Bea had fought: Maid Marian had given Bea an inviting hug in a moment of quiet, intuiting the need that was ever-present there and answering it, as she had done all day and to everyone, with Maid Marian’s desire to provide, to be all, to be adored.

  She made a victory tour of the map room where acquired bottles of champagne and other alcohol were opened and drunk. She shook hands and cheered and realized that she felt like a great, brilliantly colored beetle whose insides had been eaten out by ants.

  She chatted with everyone, her
words spilling from her, empty as styrofoam, and then she excused herself and went to her room and stood looking out the back window.

  “I’m just tired,” she whispered into the window glass. This part of the job, the part that was showboat, wore on her. There was too much work to do to waste so much time on it. But ironically, she thought, you could not get the work done—you could not empower the people to see the vision of the work—if you did not do the other.

  Zach opened the door and came and put his arm around her. He had things to say, she could feel it.

  “I’m going to go to sleep, Zach.” She wanted to be alone. She wanted to get a foothold on who she was. She feared she was failing at the promises she’d given him.

  “As you should. And so—it’s just that—”

  “Zach. I need to be alone right now.”

  “Yes, but—” Zach looked around the room and out the window into the dark backyard and stepped in close to her. He could see she was frayed and exhausted but he had more important things than her sanity to worry about. He gripped her arm hard to focus her. “I need to discuss something with you,” he whispered, “and we have to do it right now.”

  The National Guard arrived at 2 a.m. There were four trucks of soldiers, a tank, and a small fleet of jeeps. The soldiers quickly spread out and secured the block. Rangers were easily taken out if they chose to fight, but most quickly surrendered to the superior armed force.

  The tank’s first shot, from fifty yards up the street, obliterated the map room. As if a comet had taken it out on its way through, it was nothing but a gaping hole, leaking fragmented paper and dust and smoke and the sounds of human terror.

  The second shot took the back bedroom completely off the house so that the roof slumped. The teeth had been taken out of the house—the roof sloping nearly to the first floor—its bite full of gums. After the structure finished settling on itself, the National Guard moved swiftly into the house and collected the remaining few who held out. Stretchers entered the building then and pulled out the wounded and dead, and finally the great house on Going Street was empty again and Sherwood HQ was no more.

  The mayor sat in the back of a Lincoln Town Car on a runway at the airport. He’d had his driver move there from the warehouse so they could get better reception. Two of his advisers sat with him and they chatted over the top of the constant stream of National Guard chatter on the military’s open channel. They passed a bag of roasted peanuts between them. Bodies had been removed from the building and people taken prisoner, but he’d not heard any names yet. It was nearly 4 a.m. and he leaned himself into a corner, exhausted from several days of planning and the lateness. He felt shame for allowing it to come to this, and exhilaration. When the hell would they get the names?

  His driver, an assistant to the National Guard’s general, refused to take him there, citing area restrictions and the danger involved, but he desperately wanted to get a look at her, for them to lock eyes and for her to see how things had changed. He wanted to see her defeated with his own eyes. When he heard they’d used the tank on the building, he was aghast.

  “You fucking brutes,” he yelled into the leather-upholstered car. He got on the line with one of the commander’s men.

  “The commander, please,” the mayor said, knowing there was no way he’d be able to scale the wall of phone transfers required to talk to Commander Aachen in the middle of a battle.

  “Sorry, he’s indisposed at the moment.”

  “Come on. This is the mayor. Have you found her yet?”

  “I’m told they’re still sorting through bodies, sir.”

  The mayor had a physical revulsion at the remark and had to pause while his throat worked it out. “No—how many? And they’d see fucking Maid Marian, right? Everybody knows what she looks like.”

  “Yes, sir, apparently there are a few that are somewhat difficult to identify. But I’m told we haven’t see her.”

  This had gone wrong, he could see that now. He should have never trusted the National Guard.

  “We’re ceasing operations until morning upon your earlier recommendation, which the commander agreed with.”

  “Fuck the commander—find her! I don’t care how many homes you have to search.”

  There was silence on the other end. “Hello?” the mayor said, “Hello?” In violent frustration he shoved a handful of peanuts into his mouth.

  “Hello, sir, we will continue to search homes for another two hours, but efforts need to be taken to secure the country—neighborhood, area sir.”

  “Thank you—” he mumbled around his mouthful “—two more hours. If you hear or see any sign of her . . .” The line went dead.

  The mayor gripped his hair. From the backseat an adviser leaned forward and rubbed his shoulders.

  “We’ve gained a lot here tonight,” the woman reassured him. “Sherwood is gone. We can run the whole city again.”

  The mayor wondered why there was no pleasure in it. He ran his tongue across his teeth—one of the peanuts had been bad, and he could not rid his mouth of the taste of rot.

  It was the only place he could think of that felt really safe, and so they stumbled madly toward it, passing people erupting from their houses as they heard the crackle of gunfire or the boom of the tank gun.

  Zach had gone over every detail he could piece together, holding the two notes in his hand for what felt like forever on the night of their victory, as the party raged about him, their meaning dawning on him slowly. Even as they celebrated, here was the end. The city had decided to risk everything to destroy them.

  She had wanted proof of what he’d said and then they had argued.

  “Look,” she said and swept her arm across the room and toward the back, meaning the enormity of what she’d built. “I cannot leave.”

  He could see in her then a willingness to die with her nation, and it angered him.

  “You have to go! I won’t let you stay. You die here, then everything dies with you. There is no fight.”

  “Then we evacuate.”

  “Yes, OK, but have you seen them in there?” He could hear the fight in his voice, just under a yell. “They’re all drunk. The music is blaring.”

  He agreed to announce what they could, to shout out into the room, but he worried about every second that passed. And so the moment they’d finished attempting to broadcast the message, this time shouting at the stunned, blurry-eyed crowd, he pulled her from the room.

  They struggled against each other, arguing still as they left. She turned to each person they passed: The Guard is coming! And then they sprinted into the night. Across the back field they barely eluded a National Guardsman in the chaos of the first tank blast. The top half of Zach’s head felt like it had been jarred loose and filled with gravel. The map room was gone.

  In the dark around him he heard the sound of panicked running as others escaped too, boots in the field.

  She didn’t know who else got out and as she followed Zach she wept. She knew somewhere behind them the Guard was spreading out across her country, taking it back. It was over, she feared. The guard had betrayed them.

  He clutched her hand and would not let go. They ran for blocks before they stopped. Jeeps passed and they cowered in the shadows. The National Guard was spreading outward into the neighborhood behind them. He could hear their engines and the cries of people pulled from their houses as they probed for her.

  They crouched down on the porch of an empty house—coughing up dust and bile, their run having winded them. He put his hand on her shoulder to steady her as they listened to gunfire, farther away now. He wished they’d grabbed bikes, though he was unsure he could trust her on one.

  They ran from one empty house porch to the next. Many Sherwooders would have taken them in, but there would be searches and he did not want to leave a trail of
any kind. Past the perimeter of National Guard activity they avoided perplexed Rangers standing in the middle of the street, their eyes trained in the direction of Sherwood HQ, unsure if the sounds they heard were joyous celebration or something else. Warning signals flashed out into the Ranger message network, warning the Rangers away, or the conflicting message, to come fight. The many new gaps in the network caused messages to dead-end.

  On 37th and Prescott Renee wandered off the porch and toward the lights of an approaching jeep.

  “Renee!” Zach yelled. He ran into the dusty yard and tackled her around the middle, pulling her to the ground. They lay flattened there until the jeep passed. Zach held her down, gripped her to him, trying to squeeze some awareness back, some urgency.

  “I’ll turn myself in,” she said. “They’ll stop if I turn myself in.”

  “No!” Zach said. “No, you can’t.”

  He pulled her up and forced her to run again. He could see the glow of fire reflected against the smoke in the sky. The sound was building from the direction of Sherwood HQ, the chaos radiating outward toward them. He gripped Renee’s arm tightly around her bicep. Her head dipped, whether in grief or sleep or resignation he didn’t know, and so he pulled her firmly along like a rag doll.