Sherwood Nation

by Parzybok, Benjamin;

  “You mean Nazis or game bots? Doesn’t that suggest some kind of organization or evil intent or something? They’re more like mangy koala bears. They need to be taken in and loved by you. They need to be persuaded to be civil. They’re not leaders, Bran, they’re followers, they just need to be pointed to your tail.”

  “Christopher, please.”

  “Isn’t that why we have all these soldiers? To keep the city safe?”

  “You saw her speech, right?” The mayor dropped the controller and held his fist in the air, counting off on his fingers, trying and failing to keep the condescension out of his voice. “Number one, she’s cute. Number two, she looked insanely competent. Her voice did not waver. She amassed an army and put them in uniforms. They looked rumpled and retarded, but there were a lot of them and they were serious. Three”—he raised his middle finger—“she’s a fucking folk hero. That’s how she did it. That’s the only way. I don’t know what she’s paying that army, but you can bet that the appeal of serving a Ms. Guevara is a hell of a recruitment tool. Four, the entire fucking city would riot if we took her out. Think about it. It’s a rioting mood out there, it’s like everybody’s new favorite hobby, and she’s everybody’s new favorite person. And number five?”

  The mayor held his pinky in the air. The huffing German soldier and Christopher waited and watched until Christopher could see there was no number five, and knew this would be one more irritant for the mayor, one more bit of imprecision lining up in protest against his obsessive-compulsive tendencies, and so he took hold of that pinky in the air with his own fist and kissed the end of it.

  “Shoot some monsters, Bran,” Christopher said. “We’ll tackle it in the morning. Maybe she’ll have lost control by then.”

  “Nazis,” the mayor said.

  “Nazis.” Christopher patted the mayor’s shoulder and left him to his violence.

  The mayor stayed still in the empty room. The generator turned off, the batteries having filled, the bedroom door closed. The night was quiet outside, and there was an ache of fear and anger that lined his insides with the weight of lead. He kept his fist up in the air, his pinky upraised, unable to let it down until a number five came to him.

  Out the window where there’d once been a sparkling night view, the city stretched dark and dull. In the distance he could see the yellow twinkle of a fire of some kind, a house fire or a car, or even a whole block. He was comforted to see the lights of an emergency vehicle, making its slow way through the unlit chaos. That’s me, he thought, right there. Putting out fires.

  “Number five,” he whispered finally, shaking his pinky out toward the view, “she’ll fail, because people revile and fear a foreign body. What she has built is more akin to a cult. Those around her will fear its spread like a cancer and the populace will focus on cutting her out.” But he wasn’t sure this was true. A cult, a trend, a fad—any radical change had its shot at becoming the new norm, shedding the skin of the old as it went.

  He picked up the controller and reset his game and savored the thought that in the world he was about to enter he was unequivocally not the bad guy. He was an Allied soldier fighting the Nazis. His cause was just.

  The Nation

  July 17th

  Friends:

  My name is Maid Marian. You may have seen me on the news. If you’ve received this letter, you live in one of the following Northeast neighborhoods: Cully, Rose City, Beaumont-Wilshire, Alameda, Concordia, Sabin, King, Woodlawn, Vernon, Sumner and Madison South. All told we estimate there are between forty-five and sixty thousand of you. As you have probably heard by now, we have seceded this block of neighborhoods from the city. Together, we all make up a new country now: The nation of Sherwood.

  Welcome to Sherwood!

  Let’s get to know each other. The person who handed you this note is your direct link to me. He or she will show up every day—why? As of tomorrow, your water and food rations will be delivered to your door. No one needs to trouble with a water distribution again.

  Here is my promise to you:

  Together we’re going to make Sherwood safer, healthier, more educated and wealthier than the failing city that surrounds us. We would not have seceded if we didn’t believe we could do this. Together we will steer this new territory into better times. We will staff our schools so that our children may freely and safely attend once again. We will set up clinics, so that those in need may have the care they deserve. We will re-establish libraries and create book exchanges. Together we will till land, so that we can eat from the soil of our country. At night, you will feel safe walking the streets.

  Here’s what I need in return.

  I need your trust, and I need your faith. It’s not going to happen overnight. This is an extraordinary move. As they say, extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures. Give me a week of your time before you form judgment. I am not here as a seeker of power, but as a righter of wrongs. When the city can do a better job providing for its people than we can, I will quietly hand control back. The way I look at it is: We’re running an emergency government. When there’s no emergency, we will cede to democracy.

  I need your time. Sherwood is going to require volunteers. Every week you will be required to put in some community service hours. We will have census takers visit you soon to catalog your skillset.

  I need your input. Tell us how we’re doing! Tell us what needs doing. Tell us what you need. Let us function as one great organism together. To do so, we need to hear from each of you. Tell your water carrier, your water carrier will tell me.

  I will charge taxes. I promise to be bluntly honest with you, and here’s a good place to start. In order to run this government, we need a small share of your water. Two units daily—one twentieth of your daily ration. This water will be used to support clinics and farms, to pay our employees, and to make sure no one goes thirsty. It will feel steep in the first week, but I promise that our efficiency programs will more than make up for it in the long run.

  I look forward to running a marvelous country with you.

  Yours,

  Maid Marian

  Rangers spread to every edge of Sherwood, their task to seal the border that surrounded the new nation. They had at it with everything in their disposal. Across some intersections barbed wire was strung, nailed to the sides of houses. In others, dead cars were lined up into walls. Couches, refuse, construction materials, dumpsters, trailer trucks, and so on. Most were still passable by anyone determined enough to get through. For now it was the best they could do, a psychological barrier. A separation, they hoped, between chaos and order.

  Jamal had overseen a guard-booth building workshop the day before, attended by a mass of new volunteers—everyone they could dig up with building skills. It felt like months ago already. The guardhouses were simple structures made of plywood and two-by-fours and fabric, meant to give a full-time border guard or two some protection against the sun and wind and a place to sit, and to give some formality to the place, a watchful structure to ward off would-be city intruders. They built nearly a hundred of them, interspersed along the border and within sight of each other.

  He worked with two volunteers and a ranger now at the corner of 21st and Fremont in front of a crowd of onlookers, Sherwoodians and Portlanders, staring across at each other over the ugly border of discarded couches. Most were silent. The riots had taken their toll, and after the secession the people of Sherwood had turned inward, with hope and exhaustion, to lick their wounds and begin to rebuild, wide-eyed at the prospect of the task they were undertaking together. They stood now and watched, some still clutching their Maid Marian letters in their hands. The volunteer office was swamped, with prospective recruits forming a line nearly three blocks long. All who could were put to work, most with only an inkling of direction. Many of the volunteers were recruited on the spot as Maid Marian tried to fill out the employees of Sherwood. Everyone wanted a job. Volunteers received fifteen units of water extra for their work, and tha
t alone, besides having anything to alleviate the boredom-crush of drought time, was a motivating factor.

  Across from Jamal the ragtag city residents stared and whispered, just as battered by the recent riots. They looked on and wondered if they were witnessing some terrible tragedy progressing before them. A youth called out and waved and was answered on the Sherwood side, a distance of sixty feet between them, shy now as they realized they waved between countries. They wondered: Would those trapped inside endure some kind of hell, their fates bound to some dictator’s fancy? Should they fear for their safety? Or were they blessed?

  Jamal squatted and dropped his hammer to the ground, letting his blistered hands have a moment’s rest. It felt good to hold a hammer in his hand—but he had absolutely no skill here. Growing up in a drug family did not prepare you for carpentry, it turned out. A National Guard jeep drove slowly by, honking to clear the city residents who moved aside lethargically, emboldened by what progressed across from them.

  The four soldiers stared toward Sherwood with stern, impassive faces. “Well, shit,” Jamal said to no one in particular. A wave of unease passed through him.

  The city government had done nothing but pace anxiously along the border, like a beast cordoned off from its prey. He knew Sherwood’s nascent, petty army was nothing against real soldiers. Were they to storm in by force, there was nothing real holding them back. At the front line of that storm would be him, as captain of the armed Going Street Brigade.

  Jamal blew on his hands to cool the blister burn. This was his third guardhouse of the day. He suspected a thousand or more had pitched in to create the border. It was a good feeling, despite the terror of change that lay underneath it. There was camaraderie and euphoria.

  Tonight he would bear arms with the brigade, tailing Maid Marian to Irving Park, where a covert meeting with the mayor would take place.

  Green Rangers were spread through the entire territory now—each of them within eyesight of another. Gregor had made up a series of hand symbols—help, city vehicle, news crew, and so on, so that a line of sight communication chain could pass a message along back to central.

  The guardhouse was done. All but the painting. In great donation drives the territory had acquired huge stores of paint, gasoline, wood, seeds, and other useful supplies. And so tomorrow, provided they still had a country, a force of some hundreds would go painting guardhouses and border lines and the barricades. It would not be pretty, but a coat of paint would give it the look of a concerted effort, a thought-out plan, rather than trash piles at the border.

  They arrived as an armed mass of bicycles, thirty strong plus Maid Marian and Bea. They shared sparse, giddy words with each other as they dismounted and filtered between the dead trees of Irving Park in the dusk-light, and wondered if they were going to their deaths. At the far end of the park the contrast between the two groups became clear. They wheeled their bikes toward a Lincoln Town Car surrounded by police cars.

  The police were better armed and better trained, but in the dim light up close the Green Rangers were an unknown. To the police there was a mysterious and threatening quality about this new, strange army. They kept no formation and blended into the park. It was difficult to know how many there were. But most of all, they fought for something still mystifying and vague, under the guidance of her, deeply unnerving the mayor’s force.

  Beforehand, Jamal had struggled with a way to holster their weapons, and it’d made him feel like an asshole that in their first meet-up with another force, even this they had barely worked out. In the end they settled on a thigh holster made of a canvas sail scavenged from someone’s garage and sewn into shape by volunteers. It worked well enough. As he squatted behind a dead tree he gripped his gun against his leg, steady in its pouch. He was close enough to put a bullet in somebody. He looked up into the tree cautiously. You never knew when one would spontaneously shed a branch.

  The door of the Town Car swung open and from inside the backseat the mayor beckoned.

  “Don’t do it,” Bea whispered hoarsely at Renee as they approached on foot with an escort of two rangers, while the rest took up positions.

  Renee patted her friend’s arm. “Don’t worry.”

  Renee climbed into the backseat and closed the door behind her. Bea stood uncomfortably outside the car, huddled with the other two rangers, exchanging size-up looks with the police who stood nearby in the reflected glare of headlights.

  In the backseat the mayor turned sideways and scooted backwards. The car felt unreasonably small with Maid Marian in it beside him. She smelled of sweat and dirt and looked at him now with intent, grim eyes and he could feel himself on the verge of sputtering, whereas moments ago his imagination had him dominating this encounter.

  She held out her hand and he shook it. “Maid Marian,” he said.

  “Nice car,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said, and then realized he should have brought her something to drink, or something, anything to put between them. You wined and dined foreign nationals, did you not?

  “This can end without a fight,” he tried. “You could run a volunteer force, a neighborhood association, and we wouldn’t interfere and . . . ” The mayor folded his hands in his lap, and then unfolded them and rested his elbow on the headrest, in a position of greater control but less comfort.

  “It’s already done,” Renee said.

  “Not at all,” he said.

  “Listen. We went through all of your options.” She held up her fingers to tally off his detractors. “Between the U.S. Humanitarian Aid Act, my popularity, the riots, your forces which hardly have free time on their hands, the water grafting you’ve done—don’t,” she said and held her other hand up to keep him from interrupting, “—and the unrest in the rest of the city—you don’t have any options. Cede control. I’m sitting on a time bomb.”

  For a brief moment he lost track of what she’d been saying as she rattled off his problems with easy fluency. It reminded him immediately of what it had been like to fight with his mother, who had battered at him with unending lists of data. As his mind came out of its anxious reverie he found her last phrase rattling around his mind like a marble in a tin bucket. “Time bomb?” he said.

  She handed him an address on a piece of paper. “The trucks will enter here. Please make sure there are no city personnel nearby.”

  “The trucks?”

  “Distribution, obviously.”

  “The Guard?”

  She nodded, and he could see she was playing her ace.

  “There’s no way. The Guard is not going to be delivering water to your enclave-thing.”

  “Already worked out.”

  He took the paper and stared at it and was unable to read anything it said, his eyes blurring and his face burning. He didn’t know what she was talking about in regards to the Guard and he realized the meeting had gone horribly off track. “You’ve got city government and the U.S. government to contend with. You can’t seriously think you can run a country inside of a city. You’ve got twenty-four hours to—”

  “The U.S. government?” There was a scornful sarcasm in her voice.

  He’d known it was a bad tactic as he’d said it. The U.S. government was nothing but a provider of bare-necessities aid, much of it funneled from other nations. They had little influence west of the Rocky Mountains, only a moral duty, which they nominally fulfilled. They could give a damn about a micro-secession. Their local representation, the National Guard, he was supposedly in charge of, or in cahoots with, though he was regularly being reminded otherwise.

  “Let’s be clear.” Maid Marian leveled her gaze at him. “It’s me and you.” She jabbed one thin, dirty finger in the air at him, attached to, he couldn’t help but notice, a nicely shaped hand. “I plan to be a good neighbor. How about you?”

  “It is not only me, the city council—”

  “Don’t even bring up the council.”

  “We’re a democracy. You’re playing with human lives!” th
e mayor protested.

  She stared hard at him. “Spoken like a true glass house dweller. I’m heading to a news interview, anything else?”

  “No!” he hollered. He saw a policeman’s face loom large out his window and he waved him away. “Don’t go.” She had one leg out the car door and he grabbed her arm. “Do not split the population of this city. Why not be a whole unit, why not solve our problems together?” he said, finding his voice finally. “You don’t want there to be a civil war, Maid Marian.”

  “I don’t see us solving our mutual problems any time soon. I’m going to take this problem off your hands and run a tight, well-functioning nation in place of your chaos and shitty leadership.”

  “Don’t go,” he said. “Please.”

  “We’ll negotiate for other services with the private enterprises that run them.”

  “Please—”

  “Let go of my arm,” Maid Marian growled.

  “But aren’t you scared?” he said. “To be doing this? To be in charge of this many people?”

  He could see the anger in her face, how she would have liked to sock him in the nose. She dipped her head and studied the seat between them and he released her arm. It was quiet in the car. “If I were you,” she said finally, “I would be terrified.”

  After a moment she left, closing the door behind her. It was dark now and he watched her shadowy form walk back into the trees with her people, her hair glistening in the headlight beams. Like some fucking wood nymph. He bunched his fist and punched the headrest. Then he opened the door and called his advisors back in.