Jax heard the sound of running feet and faded into the shadows. Danny-boy ran from the shadows, two steps ahead of Catseye. Catseye was laughing as he ran, and the tiny drops of fog sparkled on his curly black hair. Jax stepped from the shadows, and Catseye ran to her. “They never knew what hit ‘em,” he said, still grinning, always grinning. “We got four.”
All in all, on the first night of the war, the artists got fifteen soldiers—each one labeled dead, autographed, and left with a certificate of death. Among the artists, there were no casualties.
* * * *
In the morning Jax talked to the general through the Jaxdoll. The Machine parked the van up by Twin Peaks, and Jax sat in the open doorway, looking out over the city. Puffs of red and black smoke rose near Market and Castro streets; she guessed that an ambush was underway. The morning sun glittered on the silver wings of The Angel’s glider as it soared over the streets of downtown.
“Hey, soldier,” Jax said into the microphone. “Get the general over here. I need to talk to him.” She waited, watching the smoke drift over the city.
Over the headphones, she heard a door open. “That you. General?”
“You have something to say to me?” The general was not happy.
“I just thought I’d suggest that you leave town,” she said. “This is your second warning.”
“Another warning? Why would we leave now? Because you have painted the foreheads of a few of my men?” The general laughed—an abrupt, forced sound.
“We’ve killed fifteen of your men,” Jax said. “You have only two hundred men. At this rate, in less than half a month you’ll all be dead.”
“You have killed no one. You’ve painted on the foreheads of a few men. My men are laughing today about these paintings. They are—”
“They are dead men,” Jax said, and she made her voice cold. “Dead men, General. And war is nothing to laugh at.” She could hear the rustling of clothing; someone in the room was moving restlessly. The guard perhaps.
“You fight a very stupid war,” the general said.
“We’ve never fought a war before,” Jax admitted. “We’re improvising.” Danny-boy grinned at her from across the van.
“My men have real bullets, woman,” the general said. “When we kill a man, he’s really dead.”
“Are you suggesting we should do the same?” She raised her voice. “What do you think of that, soldier? Do you think that tonight we should really kill people?”
The soldier did not speak. “You have nothing more to say to me?” the general asked. She heard him stand.
“I guess not,” she said. “The war goes on.” She heard the general close the door behind him. “Hey, soldier,” she said to the guard. “What do you think of all this?”
There was no answer.
After a moment she turned off the microphone and pulled off the headphones. “I wish the soldier had said something.” she said to Danny-boy. “I wonder if he’s one of the ones we got last night.” Danny-boy shrugged. They pulled the door of the van closed and drove off to set up temporary headquarters somewhere else.
* * * *
The war went on. The Angel showered the city with leaflets. On one side of each leaflet was a prose poem by Ralston, head of propaganda; on the other side, it said surrender before it s too late.
The Video Squad triggered a remote projector that displayed a pornographic movie on a white wall on one side of the Civic Center plaza. The movie was periodically interrupted by commercial announcements in which Danny-boy explained why the men should surrender.
Jax worked alone for the most part, finding soldiers who were alone or in pairs. At dusk on the third day of the war, she was prowling around the edge of downtown when she spotted a man sitting by himself at one side of a large plaza. She caught him from behind with a tranquilizer dart and went to label himdead. Beside one of his outstretched hands was a notepad and a pencil. He had been drawing the buildings of the city; his style was crisp and clean with sharp lines and hard edges.
She dragged him into the shadows, took his weapons, painted his forehead, and waited for him to wake up. “Hello,” she said when his eyes blinked open. “I’m Jax.”
His eyes opened wide. His hand went quickly for his gun, then came away from his empty holster slowly. His eyes focused first on the gun in her hand, then on her face.
“What . . . what do you want? Are you ...” He stopped, struggling with the words, then reached up to his forehead.
“Yeah, you’re dead,” she said calmly.
He struggled to sit up, swaying just a little. She reached out to help him, but dropped her hand when his eyes widened and he tried to edge away. “What do you want?” he tried again.
She glanced down at the sketch pad. “You do much of this?”
The soldier chewed on his lip and looked down at his hands. He shook his head quickly, an unconvincing denial. His expression was panicky, and he did not meet her eyes.
“Good composition,” she said. “Nice feeling to it. I like it.” The soldier looked startled. “When the general gives up, come and join us.”
“The general will never give up,” he said.
“Well, then, when you give up on following the general.”
“The general kills deserters.”
She frowned at him. “If you desert, how can he kill you? He’d have to catch you.” The soldier was watching her as if she were crazy. “He’s just a man.”
The soldier did not answer. She heard distant gunfire and the dull explosions of smoke bombs, and she stood up, taking his rifle with her. “Think about it,” she said, and she ran away into the twilight shadows.
* * * *
On the fifth day of the war, temporary headquarters were in the old Pacific Telephone building. Headquarters were wherever Danny-boy was, and they were always temporary. Before the fighting began the artists had set up living quarters in several different locations. All important facilities were scattered: the chemical warfare lab run by a skin painter named Tiger was on the other side of town; the repair shop for electronics was elsewhere; food was stored in a number of places.
Midway through the fifth day Gambit, a musician of the natural noise school, started his automatic bells. Gambit had spent months experimenting to find buildings with the best resonant quality and scavenging to find gongs and bells with the best tone. His favorite was a gong that he had scavenged from a Buddhist temple and hung in a brick warehouse with a high arched roof. The sledgehammer that struck the gong was powered by the controlled fall of an old safe filled with sandbags, linked to the hammer by a complex set of pulleys. The hammer struck the gong every five minutes, and when the gong rang the entire city block reverberated with a sustained middle C. Gambit had scattered twenty or so bells throughout the city, set to ring according to a precise mathematical formula. Jax thought that the clash of notes sounded like nothing so much as distant explosions.
Jax came in from the street with her head aching from the constant clamor of the bells. In the basement room that served as headquarters the bells were muffled, but she could still hear them. She wondered what they sounded like in the general’s rooms.
Danny-boy was studying a map that he had pinned to a wall. One hand was against the wall, propping him up. He smiled when he saw Jax, but his smile had a jittery look about it.
“They’re getting worried,” he said. “The soldiers are traveling in groups of two or three now.”
“I know,” said Jax.
“The general is mad and he’s yelled at three men this morning so far. The guys that aren’t dead yet don’t trust the guys that are dead. They won’t go on patrol with the dead ones.”
“How do you know that?” She looked over his shoulder at the map and could make no sense of the marks he had made on it.
“Phone system,” he said. “Wherever the lines are still up, The Machine can listen in on anything within earshot of a phone. There are still a few phones around.” He turned from the map and put o
ne arm around her shoulders. “Did you know that you’re a ghost? You can make yourself invisible—that’s how you manage to get so many men. And I’m some kind of god-hero too.”
“We’re starting to get to them.”
Danny-boy nodded. “They seem to think we’re immortal or invulnerable, since they still haven’t shot or caught any of us.”
“Yeah? Well, don’t let them fool you into thinking the same thing. We’ve been real lucky so far.”
“I thought that was skill,” he said. He grinned, and for a moment he did not look as tired.
“Mostly luck. Those guys are good shots—I’ve seen them practicing. But the city spooks them, and they don’t know where to aim.” She shrugged. “All it will take is one stray shot, and someone on our side will be a casualty. Don’t fool yourself.”
“I know better,” he said. “I know you aren’t a ghost.”
“Did you get any sleep last night?” she asked him.
He shrugged. “Not much. I went out with Catseye and Zatch. I wanted to keep an eye on Catseye.”
“Get any sleep today?”
“A nap. It’s hard to sleep with those bells going.”
“Do you know how long it will take those damn things to run down?”
“Maybe a week,” he said.
“Come on,” she said, and she took his hand and led him away from the map down one flight of stairs to a room still deeper beneath the city. On the floor was a straw-tick mattress and a few blankets. She could still hear the bells, but they were a distant annoyance now. Danny-boy lay down beside her and put his arms around her. He was frowning.
“Something wrong?” she asked.
“Nothing new,” he said.
“You worried now?”
He shrugged. “Just tired,” he said. “That’s all.”
She kissed him and snuggled closer. “We’ll be legendary,” she said. “Now go to sleep.”
She held him until he fell asleep in her arms.
* * * *
The war went on.
Tiger, working alone in the war chemicals division, made three batches of a new kind of smoke bomb, one that released an hallucinogenic gas.
The Angel dropped a new set of leaflets: on one side was a picture of a group of pretty women; on the other side it said join us.
Ralston began propaganda broadcasts through the system of loudspeakers left from the Summer Solstice Festival. Mama A, a blues singer with a rich contralto voice, was the main DJ. “Soldiers,” she said in sweetly chiding tones. “Why do you keep fighting? There’s no need for that, no need at all. Put down your rifles and come join us. We’d be glad to have you. Don’t you understand that you’re free men?” By the end of the second day of broadcasting, the soldiers had found all the speakers and destroyed them at the general’s orders.
Jax, working with Zatch and Catseye, laid a trap near Mission Dolores Park. They made a convincingly gruesome open grave by dressing department store mannequins in army green, splashing them with red-brown paint, and tumbling them into a shallow trench. “Toss a little dirt on top,” Catseye suggested. Zatch heaved a few shovelfuls of dirt over the dead mannequins, and Jax turned one dummy’s head so that its eyes did not stare glassily skyward. The trench, which was left over from a fountain-building project abandoned in favor of the war, extended for about ten feet past the buried mannequins.
Jax stood over the grave. Her tranquilizer rifle was slung over one shoulder, the rifle taken from the soldier she had caught sketching over the other. “Looks convincing,” she said.
Catseye waited in the tower of a nearby church. Jax and Zatch waited on the low rooftop of an old store, lying almost prone behind the high facade that faced the street. Jax lay her head on her arms and tried to relax. About ten of Gambit’s bells were still ringing, but she had grown accustomed to their sound.
“You look tired,” Zatch said. He folded his arms and rested them on the low facade. He was a burly man with strong hands and an unshakable confidence in himself.
She shrugged. “Everyone’s tired,” she said.
He nodded and kept an eye on the street. “Danny-boy’s been looking bad.”
“Yeah,” she said, turning her head to stare at him. “And I’m sure the general is tired and the guys we’re going to ambush are tired and you’re tired.” She shrugged. “Danny-boy’s okay.”
“There,” Zatch said, pointing at Catseye’s tower. Catseye was waving—a patrol was coming. He waved three times, indicating three men. Jax moved forward and came to a crouch just behind the high facade of the store. Zatch followed. Jax let the three soldiers pass the store, then fired a burst of bullets just behind them. They whirled and stopped in the center of the street. They could not see her.
“Drop your guns,” Zatch said. His voice echoed and made his exact location impossible to pinpoint. The soldiers conferred, a small huddle of frightened young men. Jax could not hear what they were saying.
“Drop them,” she said. “This is Jax and I’m getting impatient.”
A thin youth with red hair was the first to place his rifle in the street, put his hands up, and back away. The other two followed. All three were markeddead.
Jax stood and covered the soldiers while Catseye climbed down from his tower, and he covered them while she and Zatch dropped to the street. “That way,” she said, jerking her head down the street toward the park.
The redhead led the way, stumbling once or twice over potholes, walking awkwardly with his hands high. “Are we prisoners?” he asked over his shoulder.
“We don’t take prisoners,” Catseye said. He narrowed his black eyes and showed his teeth wolfishly. Jax frowned; she had warned him against overacting.
The redhead saw the grave at that moment. He stopped in the middle of the alley, his hands drooping from their position above his head. He turned, his mouth a little open, working as if to say words that did not come. “But,” he said. “You don’t ...” He could not manage to say anything more. He looked at Jax, who was standing just behind Catseye. She held the rifle casually in the crook of her arm. The kid’s gaze darted past her to Zatch, who stood just behind her holding a tranquilizer rifle. No escape.
“Stand over there,” she said, jerking her head toward the open section of the trench.
“But you can’t . . .” he was saying.
Catseye shoved him and he moved. The other two, both younger than the redhead, let themselves be pushed. They stood beside the open trench, looking to him for guidance, looking to Jax for sympathy. “Hands up,” she said. “Now.” Zatch fired with the tranquilizer gun.
The soldiers fell with maddening slowness into the pit. Jax stood over them as Zatch retrieved the darts. “They thought they’d had it,” Jax said.
Zatch nodded and folded the soldiers’ arms gently across their chests. He climbed out of the pit, and the three artists headed back for the city center.
* * * *
A squad of poets staged a raid on the men guarding the jeeps. The Angel had dropped several of the new bombs in that area, and the men did not put up much of a fight. The poets labeled them with extremely short verses: dead by Fred; death by Seth; kill by Bill. The poets sustained one injury—a scat singer was hit in the arm by a ricocheting bullet and had to be patched by the medic.
The artists captured their first deserter that same day. The poets found a young man without a rifle wandering out by the ocean’s edge at Land’s End. They brought him back, and the artists established a halfway house for deserters at some distance from temporary headquarters. At that point temporary headquarters were in a warehouse building on the waterfront.
“Hey, General, your men are giving up on you,” Jax said to the general via the Jaxdoll. “Don’t you think you should leave our city soon? When are you going to give up?”
“I don’t give up,” said the general.
“Will you give up when your men leave you?”
“A few may leave. The others will not. They fear me too much.” J
ax could hear the general lean back in his chair. He sounded as if he were smiling. “One of my lieutenants thought he could leave me. That was in Los Angeles. I tracked him down and shot him in front of the others. My men don’t leave me.”
When Jax shut off the microphone, she found Danny-boy and persuaded him to take a break and have a cup of chicory tea with her. She wanted to talk to him about the general’s unwillingness to give up, about a possible change in tactics. The artists continued to specialize in harassment and improvisational ambush. This strategy continued to be successful, but the fighters were beginning to show signs of strain.
A small kerosene stove had been set up in one of the ground floor offices. Jax and Danny-boy were waiting for the water to boil when Lily dragged in with two men. One man was limping; the others were smudged with soot. Lily, a slender wiry redhead, was frowning, and Jax could see the track of tears through the soot on her face.
Universe 14 - [Anthology] Page 10
