A warning gun shot rang out and Zach turned to see the National Guard jeeps circling in close. The crowd huddled angrily. They were promised another water truck would arrive sooner rather than later. Zach hurried his bottle out of the park toward home. He needed to meet someone. To pair up. Perhaps his patient. Walking the streets alone with a bottle was a risk he didn’t want to take often.
Back at the three-story building, he went to the roof and looked out at the city. Soon the people would be getting ready to settle into darkness, gathering ration candles, if they had them, the coming power outage about to dim the landscape.
He opened his unit gallon and drank three units off before he could stop himself, and when he did, he felt as though he’d only wetted his lips, mere drops in the dry well of him. He found some empty canning jars, retrieved his permanent marker and sat in front of his unit gallon and concentrated on distributing a portion from each to a jar before he would allow himself another drink. Sherwood habit. He labeled the jars with their intended purpose.
Jamal saw a young boy of nine or ten at the end of the street. He walked with a heavily practiced gait, swinging his brown arms aggressively and with flair. He wore a black sweatshirt and white sweatpants, negating entirely, in Jamal’s mind, the effect of cool the boy sought. But what did he know? He was already too old for street fashion. The boy was thin and looked like he needed a bath, three square meals a day, and the care of an attentive mother to set him back on some forward-facing track. None of which Jamal felt he’d turn down himself.
The boy crossed the street toward them and his swagger faltered once as he made eye contact with them, and then intensified as he got close.
“Y’all be looking for yo Rain-Joes?”
“You’ve seen them?”
“Check da house.” The boy pointed to the same house where the note claimed Charles was in charge.
“Oh? Hey wait—” Jamal said, but the boy turned to walk away. Jamal called after him, “Who is Charles?” and he thought he saw a noticeable jerk in the boy’s walk, as if a marionette string had been yanked violently, throwing one leg in the wrong direction. The boy quickly regained his stride and was gone.
“Somebody sent him,” Rick said.
“We’re being watched,” Carl said.
“Yep,” Rick said.
“It’s a trap,” Carl said.
“Yep,” Rick said.
Jamal fought the desire to cut and run, fifteen-year-old memories running ghost-like over his anxieties.
“My spidey sense is tingling,” Rick said.
“Don’t say spidey sense,” Carl said, “just don’t say it.”
“What? Why not?”
“There’s no such word as spidey.”
“It’s from—”
“I know what the fuck it’s from,” Carl said. “But listen to it. There’s ‘spider’ and ‘spidery,’ there’s no ‘spidey.’”
Rick deepened his voice and gave it an English accent, “My spidery senses are causing my fancies to tingle.”
“Where is everybody?” Jamal said.
They locked their bikes to a stop sign and kept watch on the house at the end of the street.
A cloud passed over the sun and Jamal stared into the sky, seeing great clouds there like the front line of an infantry passing by. They would bring no rain, he knew, only dust.
“Does anyone have a plan?” Jamal asked hopefully, feeling that the proper thing to say was: I have a plan, seeing as how he was in charge, and realizing that he was relinquishing some morsel of authority simply by asking the question.
“Check out the house,” said Rick. He was digging in a flesh-colored fanny pack—which Jamal noticed for the first time was actually a pack and not part of the man’s flesh. He came up with an extra clip, which he put in his back pocket.
They were so not a real army, Jamal thought, not the Going Street Brigade, and especially not the measly three of them. He wished he’d brought another fifty soldiers with him. He looked up the street for a Ranger to signal with, but the streets were dead empty in all directions.
“You think they’re still alive?” Carl said.
“I’m not thinking anything,” Rick said.
“We can hope,” Jamal said. But he couldn’t imagine why anyone would go taking hostages. Life was cheap in the drought. Who would waste the water to keep a hostage alive?
“This is going to creep me right out if we don’t start doing something right now,” Rick said.
They fanned out and walked toward the house at the end of the street. On the right at the end of the block was what appeared to be a micro junkyard, with high fences and several dozen old junkers. There used to be big, angry dogs there, Jamal remembered, who would throw themselves against the fence to get at him as he walked by.
Jamal signaled for Rick to go up the stairs of the house and knock while he covered him. The house had a tall porch with broad steps. It was built in the twenties, before the shop behind it had blocked off its backyard with a big concrete wall.
Next to the door was a large, intact window that led to the living room, covered by a full curtain.
Carl eased around the right side of the porch and managed to find a vantage where he could keep an eye on Rick.
As Rick turned the doorknob, Jamal watched Rick’s body jerk with gunshot impacts and then fall against the door, which swung wide with the pressure. Jamal ducked and looked around wildly—the shots were coming from elsewhere, though he could see no gunmen. There was nowhere to run, except into the house. Jamal leapt up the side of the porch, nearly colliding with Carl, and felt one leg twitch away from him, an icy coolness there that began to yield pain. And then he was inside, dragging Rick’s body deeper into the house.
After Jamal had been gone for ten hours, Gregor paced around the map room, blisters of anger and worry erupting from him in sharp bursts.
Maid Marian sat on the big orange knit couch and observed how quickly the system had fallen apart without Zach. She was angry at him for not training others well enough. He’d become irreplaceable. And yet she had spent time with that convoluted brain, knew the feeling of irritated bafflement that came over her when he tried to explain how the system he’d created worked. He’d trained a horse only he could ride. When Zach was gone there was nothing left but to shoot the horse.
“Tell me again where he is?” Gregor said, pointing at the piles of notes with his pipe.
She’d not seen Gregor like this before. He went to his knees and began rummaging through a box, making an utter mess of the notes, reading them at random and then throwing them aside. He’d lost a son and a wife already, she remembered. “Zach is not coming back,” she said quietly.
“Yes, but why? Where is he?”
She didn’t want to get into this with anyone, especially not her general. Dictators don’t have spouses. Dictators have low-level, disposable concubines. It should be easy, like a toddler’s passing interest in a toy. You find a Ranger. You pick him up and then you set him down when you’re finished. Were these different times Zach and she might be together, but she couldn’t worry about the feelings of anyone else, especially not her chief of intelligence. And yet, she did, and it was her complex, conflicting emotions that’d finally been too much for him.
“Zach has gone home to the Southeast,” she said.
“We need him here,” Gregor said, he held up a crumpled wad in each hand. “He’s left a shithole.”
Renee shrugged dismissively. She wanted this topic to end. She picked up the handful of notes she’d been reading through and began filtering through them; her eyes had trouble with the words, her mind unfocused.
“I’ll go get him,” Gregor said. “He can’t abandon post.”
“How?”
With irritation Gregor said: “We’ll slip through the border and bring him back.”
Renee watched her general pace back and forth in front of her. She realized it had been a mistake to allow him to appoint his own kin as captain o
f the Going Street Brigade. The same kind of mistake as appointing your boyfriend to be information officer.
She thought about kidnapping Zach. Could they hold him here as a worker? She wasn’t sure. She told herself she needed to make the decision for the nation. If fetching Zach was something that could right her general and keep security from collapsing, then it was necessary.
“He’s somewhere in Woodlawn,” Gregor said, speaking of Jamal. “This makes six disappeared in forty-eight hours. We need a force to go raze the neighborhood.”
“No,” she said. She got up and began to pace on the other side of the table, their pacing like two pendulums working in opposite synchronization.
There were two Rangers under the charge of Gregor waiting for his orders. Leroy hovered close and tried to reassemble the various messes Gregor made while Bea read notes from the pile. Renee could see Bea work studiously at the notes, ashamed for being the last to see both Jamal and Zach.
“There’s nothing from Woodlawn here,” Bea said. “Only today’s notes. Last week is gone. Jamal must have taken them.”
Gregor walked to the Woodlawn neighborhood map section and tapped on it with the end of his unlit pipe. To her he looked stooped and suddenly aged. Renee waved one of Gregor’s Rangers over. “You know Morse code, right? I need you to go to the Vernon tank, that old water tower on Twentieth and Prescott. You know it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Take a friend and this.” Renee handed over the green laser pointer she fingered in her pocket.
“I have one of my own, sir, if you’d prefer. I’m a semaphorist.”
“Of course you are, fucking Zach,” she said. “Well, that’s what I want you to do. Stand on the south side of the tower and aim high enough on the tank with your pointer. He used to watch that tower for messages in the early evenings from the Southeast.”
“What should I say, sir?”
“To get his ass back up here, right now,” Gregor said.
Renee shrugged. “Please. Tell him Jamal is missing and . . . you probably won’t even get him, he’s not going to be out there anymore. You know what? I’ll go, you come with me.”
Bea stood up quickly.
“Goddamnit!” Gregor said. “I don’t know what to do with this crap.” He threw down the pile of notes he’d been shuffling without reading. He felt he was reliving a nightmare from his past, when he’d been willful and arrogant and at war with Barstow. Except then he knew who his enemy was.
“Gregor,” Renee said and signaled for him to leave the room with her. In the hallway they whispered. “What don’t I know about this,” she said.
Gregor briefed her on his Woodlawn history. He spoke in a hoarse whisper, an aura of defeat about him.
“But we’re not drug dealers,” Renee said, “we’re the government of Sherwood. This is not Zach’s fault. It’s not Jamal’s or Bea’s fault. This is a situation. We handle situations. Get with Leroy, pull a month’s worth of notes, read them all. If a note is odd, ask Leroy if he knows the address. Do your work, remember who you are. I’ll work on Zach.” She pressed her hand into his chest and said, “We can totally do this. We’re not going to fall apart.”
Gregor straightened. “Yes, sir,” he said.
They held each other’s gaze and she felt like she was staring into a mine the depth of which was unknown. “We’re OK?” she asked.
“We’re OK,” he said.
She could not read him, but his demeanor seemed free of resentment. It was the first time she’d ever seen him lose focus and she couldn’t help but want to apologize for giving him—a generation older and a leader for decades—a lecture.
“OK then,” she said.
The Trouble
Jamal sat on the living room floor and stared out into the street through the window. For a moment he’d lost his shit and now he was getting it under control. Rick was laid out on the wood floor in the next room with a couple of bullet wounds that would down a polar bear. He could hear his ragged breathing. Carl was checking doors and windows, looking for vantage points and escape routes, gathering supplies and whatever the hell else the man found it necessary to do in a situation like this. Carl hadn’t been shot.
Jamal removed his clenched hand from his calf muscle and tried to figure out what was going on there besides a whole lot of pain and blood. He unraveled bits of his jeans, removing them from the center of the mess with a substantive uptick in negative sensation.
“You hit too, buddy?” Rick said from the other room. His voice was wet and croaky, a forced whisper.
“How are you even still alive?” Jamal said.
“That’s not very reassuring, boss,” he croaked.
“Just—stay that way. We’ll get out of this.”
“There you go.”
Jamal heard Carl cussing from the back of the house.
“He hit too? We could be blood brothers. You do that when you were a kid?”
“No, man,” Jamal said. “What do I do?” If this was one way to keep him alive, he thought, to grant strange last wishes, to appease and by appeasing to leaven, he would do it.
Rick indicated that Jamal should touch his leg to Rick’s wounded arm.
Fuck it, Jamal thought. If this is what was expected of him as a leader, this he could do, as meaningless as it felt in the moment. They were out of sight of the window and he could hear Carl scuffling around in the back of the house. He assented and overcame a moment of squeamishness. They awkwardly touched limb to limb, a light brush of wounds, exchanging some microscopic bit of blood. They did so before they each died, he thought, and dying was alone, and with this tiny bit of blood he took a weird superstitious comfort.
He inspected his leg. There was no bullet wound on the other side and Jamal wondered if there was a bullet inside his leg still, hidden there like an Easter egg, a little metal bit of treasure he could carry around. His leg felt heavy, like it had an anchor tied to the end of it.
“I found our Rangers,” Carl said. “No one else is here.” He crawled into the dining room, keeping out of sight of the windows, and sat next to Rick. “You look like shit.”
“You’re not reassuring either,” Rick groaned. When he’d caught his breath he said: “Nobody teach you fuckers can-do attitude?”
“They’re all laid out neat in the back bedroom,” Carl said, “one strangled, the other two—they’re all dead.”
“Not going to be any help in a firefight,” Rick said.
Jamal looked back out at the street but it was still and quiet, as it had been moments before a hornets’ nest of bullets fell upon them. His calf had bled in a solid stripe down into his shoe before he’d sat down and he could feel the wet stickiness at his heel. The wound looked like an eye, and he stared into it. For a moment he again considered the possibility that he would die here and he felt a fearful excitement about it.
“Got grazed, did you?” Carl said. He’d crawled across the floor without Jamal noticing.
“Grazed?” He inspected his leg again, tenderly wiping away the blood to get a better look. He saw how the wound was a mark across his calf. It had taken a small chunk of flesh as it passed. There was no bullet inside, and he felt lighter and more able and a little disappointed upon learning this.
“I’ll be at the window there.” Carl pointed. “There’s a concrete wall in the backyard. The only way out of this is through that front door. Not a bad spot to hold off a siege. Tie some cloth around that.” Carl nodded at his wound.
After Carl crawled to his post Jamal began to come back to himself from an altered state. The adrenalin receded, his breath evened, and his mind cleared. He thought of his Going Street Brigade, divvied into duty and rest, some home with families, and wondered how he could get word to his father.
He used his knife to cut off one of his sleeves and this he tightened around his calf.
“Ask them to hurry up,” Rick said.
From behind the big window’s curtain—the glass all shot out—he tried to
search out who had attacked them. It had been a great number of bullets. Quantity over quality. Though they’d done fairly well with Rick.
There was no indication of anyone living out there. Two of the houses on the block looked like empty shells, the windows gone and the insides stripped out. The micro-junkyard on the corner had a tall fence and he couldn’t see any visible gun ports. For his part, he didn’t plan on doing anything that would draw their fire. He supposed they would wait.
It was an unsettling feeling. Siege was such a medieval word, with archers and catapults to fend off. And time itself had to be fended off as well, as the castle defenders cut their rations and waited, and cut their rations again. He suspected that madness was the primary weakness in the walls and gates, that and a fear that screwed its way into you.
He needed to check on rations, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave the window. He stared out at the houses and tried to decipher shapes in the shadows, until the images were burned into his eyes and boredom and fright ached in him. He readjusted his legs and found one had gone asleep. The pain of unraveling it and the movement of his wounded calf made him call out.
Sherwood Nation Page 32
