The City, Not Long After

by Pat Murphy

  “You’ll destroy an entire city for the sake of an example?”

  “For the sake of the nation, Danny-boy,” Fourstar said. “For the sake of the greater good. This city is a small sacrifice. A few buildings, a few human lives—what do they matter? The nation will survive. You people just can’t see the larger picture. You’re trapped in your provincial view. If you could see the big picture, as I can, then you’d understand.”

  “So you’re destroying the city to save the nation.”

  “Exactly. Unless, of course, you and I can come to some accommodation. If we could work out some compromise…”

  “No,” Danny-boy said.

  “No possibility of compromise,” Fourstar said. “What a pity.” He did not sound sorry. “You leave me with no choice.”

  Jax heard another explosion in the background. Danny-boy switched off the radio, unwilling to listen to more. “I can’t believe he’s doing this,” Danny-boy said.

  “Believe it,” Jax said. “This is war.”

  He walked away from her, shaking his head. For a time he stood at the window, looking out. Jax sat by the mannequin, wondering what to do. She wanted to help somehow, but she could think of nothing to say.

  “I don’t believe it,” Danny-boy said again, but his tone had changed. He laughed. “I just don’t believe it.”

  Outside the window, snow was falling: great wet impossible flakes of snow. The streets turned dark as the snow melted on the pavement. The window rattled as the wind spattered snow against the pane. The sky was gray overhead, but the clouds were darkest in the direction of the Civic Center Plaza. Jax imagined the damp snow clinging to the soldiers’ boots, drenching their clothing, drifting against the treads of the tank.

  “The city’s fighting back,” Danny-boy said. He grinned at her. “I wonder how their tank is equipped for cold weather.”

  CHAPTER 23

  The war went on. The tank stalled in the cold, despite the best efforts of the army’s mechanics. The wind and snow conspired to bury the vehicle in a drift, and after a while the soldiers quit trying to dig it out.

  The soldiers supplemented their uniforms with jackets from downtown stores, and the army took on a mismatched, ragtag appearance, a mix of down parkas, flannel hunting coats, and brightly colored ski jackets.

  Soldiers patrolled the streets in small nervous groups, carrying their weapons always ready. They talked in voices that seemed unnecessarily loud and spooked at the slightest sound.

  Jax spent most of her time on the streets, following patrols and waiting for an opportunity to ambush an unwary soldier. The city was a big place and at one time or another everyone has to be alone. A man who lingered behind his companions to piss in an alley or pilfer a shop was fair game, she figured.

  When she slept, she slept lightly, alert even in her dreams. Sometimes she holed up in temporary headquarters. More often, she slept wherever she could: on out-of-the-way rooftops, sheltered by the chimneys; in Golden Gate Park, perched in the treetops; in the tunnels, secure in the embrace of the city.

  She was napping in a storm drain when a patrol stopped for a smoke by the open grating. She could hear their voices, echoing through the pipe. A man with a deep voice was razzing a soldier who had flipped out the previous night and shot out all the windows in an empty building. “Ranger, baby, you wasted that building,” the deep voice said. “You nailed every damn window. And you know how the General feels about conserving ammo.”

  “I saw ’em out there,” a young man’s voice said sullenly. “Saw ’em moving in on my position.” Jax could hear the strain in his voice. “Fucking ghosts. They live here.”

  “Can’t shoot ghosts, Ranger,” said another voice. “Shoot ’em and they just come back for more.”

  “Fucking city,” Ranger muttered. “Too goddamn many shadows.”

  Jax closed her eyes and pictured him: he was skinny, she thought, and young—not much older than she was. His hair was cut so short that his scalp showed through the stubble. When he talked, he hunched his shoulders forward as if to protect himself. His eyes had a wild haunted look. She felt sorry for him.

  “You heard about the dogs?” said the man who claimed you couldn’t shoot ghosts. “Wilson saw them down by the ocean. Monster dogs with glowing eyes, running along the sand.”

  Tiger had suggested painting Randall’s pack with fluorescent dyes. Apparently he’d done so.

  “Did he shoot ’em?” Ranger asked.

  “Can’t shoot ghosts, Ranger,” the voice repeated. “I told you that already.”

  “You gotta do something,” Ranger muttered.

  “You seen the monkeys?” the first man asked. “I hear that the monkeys running around here are the same ones that started the Plague. That’s what I hear. Or maybe they’re ghosts too.”

  “You guys are nuts,” said the deep voice. “Ghosts.” The man put a wealth of contempt into the single word. “There ain’t no ghosts. Just shadows, like anywhere else.”

  “Yeah, right,” Ranger said in a hopeless tone. “That’s why no one’s ever seen Jax, or Danny-boy, or any of them.”

  “Hey, boy, you’re just afraid that Jax is going to draw on your face.”

  “It’s not my face I’m worried about.”

  Jax imagined that Ranger was rubbing his neck. She had taken to marking a broad red line across the throat of each victim—from just below the left ear, to just below the right ear. She thought the effect was quite suggestive.

  “It’ll take one bullet to put Jax away, same as anyone else,” said the deep voice.

  Jax lay on her back with one arm tucked behind her head, listening to the man talk of her death.

  “Yeah, you’re a hard guy, Marcos. A real hard guy. You already got the mark, man. You got no reason to talk. Why don’t you go looking for Jax some night? You go looking for her and see what happens.”

  “Right, man,” said Marcos. “You’d like that. I got no time for this bullshit.”

  Jax heard Marcos’ footsteps walking away.

  “Bastard,” a man muttered. “He’s already a dead man. Lot of balls he has giving the rest of us advice. I think we should blow the whole fucking place up. Burn it down.”

  “It’s so damn cold. It just ain’t natural.” Jax imagined Ranger huddled in his jacket, pulling it tight around him against the cold. There was an hysterical edge in his voice. “We should leave, that’s what we should do. Leave while we still can.”

  “Watch what you say, Ranger,” the other man said softly. “The General doesn’t like that kind of talk.”

  “Don’t mean anything by it,” Ranger grumbled. “I just want to go home, that’s all. We don’t belong here.”

  On the sixth day (or maybe the seventh, it was hard to keep count), Jax participated in a cooperative attack on a patrol, using a type of bomb that Tiger had concocted. Instead of smoke the bomb released jasmine-scented perfume, laced with a form of LSD. Late in the afternoon, The Machine dropped the bombs on a patrol in the Western Addition. Jax and her companions were equipped with gas masks; the soldiers were not. Jax lay low while the soldiers used up their ammunition on shadows and hallucinations. Then she helped Snake and Zatch and Gambit round up the tripping soldiers and mark them one by one.

  Jax caught the last one just as the sun was setting. He had wandered far from the site of the attack. When Jax found him he was strolling down the middle of Haight Street, singing cheerfully. He staggered now and then, but the betrayal of his legs seemed to amuse rather than distress him. He carried no weapons. When she approached him, he grinned at her like a happy kid.

  “You doing all right, soldier?” she asked.

  “Just fine,” he said. “You know, I saw an angel flying up this way. A golden angel, flying over the city.”

  “I’ve seen the angel,” she said. “You must be Jax.”

  “That’s right.”

  He laughed merrily. “You look just like my girlfriend back home.” He had dark hair and brown eyes and h
e seemed quite pleased with himself. “You going to paint on my forehead?”

  “I thought I might,” she said. “All right.”

  He leaned against a wall, obediently turning his head so that the fading sunlight shone on his face. Because she had the time, she embellished the word DEAD with a flowering vine growing up the E and a skull grinning from the hole in the A. As she worked, she talked with the soldier.

  “What’s your name, soldier?”

  “Private First Class Davis,” he said. “But everyone calls me Dave.”

  “Don’t frown, Dave,” she said. “You’ll smear the paint.”

  Dave tried to stop frowning and started to giggle. He was a very happy soldier.

  “So when are you going to give up this war?” she asked him. “Don’t you think it’s about time?”

  “Oh, I’ll give up,” he said. “I don’t care. I’ll give up anytime. It’s the General who won’t give up. He never gives up.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Oh, I know.” He nodded solemnly. “I used to be one of his personal guards. Of course, I won’t be a guard anymore. The General doesn’t trust a man, once he has the mark.”

  “Of course not,” she said, adding another leaf to the vine. “But if Fourstar won’t quit, why don’t you quit following Fourstar?” He bit his lip and looked very young and serious. “The General kills deserters,” he said.

  “If you desert, how can he kill you? He’d have to catch you.” She frowned at him. “Surely you could get away. He’s just a man.”

  “That’s not true,” the soldier said. His eyes were wide and frightened. “He’s more than that. He’d find me. Just like you.”

  “What do you mean, just like me?”

  But he didn’t answer. He was looking at his hand, and he seemed suddenly fascinated by the texture of his fingerprints. She heard distant gunfire and the dull explosions of smoke bombs. She finished the last letter of her signature. It was time to go. She touched his hand and said, “Goodbye. Take care.” And she ran away through the streets.

  CHAPTER 24

  DURING THE SECOND WEEK OF THE WAR, Gambit started his Automatic Bells. Before the war he had searched tirelessly for buildings with the best resonant quality and for gongs and bells with the best tone. His favorite combination was a gong that he had taken from a Buddhist temple and hung in Saint Mary’s Cathedral. Every fifteen minutes, a sledgehammer struck the gong, producing a sustained middle C that could be heard for blocks. The sledgehammer was powered by the controlled fall of a safe full of sandbags, which was linked to the hammer by a complex set of pulleys. Gambit had scattered twenty-one similar bells throughout the city, setting them to ring according to a precise mathematical pattern.

  Danny-boy could hear the bells even in the innermost office of the Pacific Telephone Building, which was serving as temporary headquarters. The noise jangled and disrupted his thoughts. In the brief lulls when no bells rang, he discovered he was bracing himself for the next note. He wondered how loud they were in Fourstar’s rooms and he hoped that Fourstar’s head ached as much as his did.

  Danny-boy was trying to ignore the bells and discuss strategy with Books when Jax burst into the room. “You’ve got to come talk to Frank,” she said. “Hurry.”

  “Why? What’s going on?”

  “Just come on.”

  She would not stop long enough to answer his questions. She grabbed his hand and dragged him out the door. Without the building to muffle the bells, each low note vibrated in his bones.

  He gave up trying to question Jax and simply followed her, running along alleys and over rooftops. She led him to the Garden of Light. Or rather, to what was left of the Garden.

  The framework of the mirror maze still stood, an elaborate structure of crisscrossing metal strips. A few of the mirrors had remained intact, but most were broken—peppered with bullets, shattered by a kick or a blow from a rifle butt. Jax led the way. The broken glass crunched beneath her feet. Danny-boy followed, staring at the destruction with horror.

  “He won’t move,” Jax said over her shoulder. “I couldn’t convince him.”

  Frank sat beside the remains of the stained glass window. Shards of colored glass and fragments of mirrors littered the pavement around him. Someone had used the window for target practice. The top half was gone. The bottom half was riddled with holes. Frank did not look up as they approached.

  Danny-boy squatted beside Frank, putting a hand on the old man’s shoulder. Jax hung back, scanning the street for signs of Fourstar’s men.

  “Frank!” Danny-boy had to shout to be heard over the bells. “We’ve got to get under cover. It’s not safe here.”

  The old man looked up and Danny-boy saw what he was holding. The Virgin Mary’s face, still miraculously intact, smiled from Frank’s hands.

  Frank said something, but Danny-boy caught only a few words between one bell and the next. “I just don’t understand …”

  Danny-boy felt disoriented. The bells pounded in his head. Frank had worked on the Garden of Light for years, and Fourstar had destroyed it in a day. “You’re right,” he said. His voice sounded odd, like someone else’s voice. “It doesn’t make sense.” He had nothing more to say.

  People expected him to have words to say. Ever since he had proposed the plan to fight the war, people had been looking to him for words. But he had no more words. He groped for things to say and found a hollow place where words should have been.

  He looked down, afraid to meet Frank’s eyes, afraid to look at Jax, afraid to catch a glimpse of his own face in a mirror.

  “Talk to him,” Jax said. “You’ve got to talk to him.” Danny-boy shook his head. The bells filled the silence.

  “So it’s broken,” Jax said suddenly. Her voice was loud enough to carry over the bells. “Big deal. You can build it again, after all this is over. It’s just a lot of glass, Frank. You know that. It was wonderful, but that’s all it was: a lot of glass. You can do it again. Or do something better.”

  She grabbed Frank’s shoulder and shook him a little. For a moment the bells had fallen silent, in one of the unpredictable rests that were a part of their pattern. “Suppose I gave you a choice. You could have saved the Garden by giving Fourstar the city. But if Fourstar took the city, then he’d never let you build anything new. What would you choose—the Garden that was, or all the Gardens you have yet to build?”

  Frank studied her face. “Not a fair question,” he said softly.

  “I don’t have time to be fair,” she said. “If anyone comes along now, we’re dead meat.” She glanced at Danny-boy. “Someone told me once that making something beautiful changes who you are. Even if what you make lasts for just a day, you’re a different person because of it. Making the Garden changed who you are, and they haven’t broken that.” She shook her head and glanced at Dannyboy again. “I’m saying it all wrong. I don’t know the right words.” Frank looked at the face in his hands and then at Jax. “Of course I would choose the Gardens of the future. There’s no choice there. I just wish it could be different.”

  “Come on,” Jax said. She held out her hand and helped him up. “You too,” she said to Danny-boy. Her voice was uncharacteristically gentle. “We’d better get back to headquarters.”

  A single bell rang with a low deep note; then the others star ted, and an avalanche of music pursued them through the streets. At the Pacific Telephone Building they turned Frank over to Tiger, though the old man was already protesting that he was fine, just a momentary shock.

  “Thanks,” Danny-boy said to Jax. “I didn’t know what to say. It was because of me, because of my plan, that the soldiers destroyed the Garden. If I hadn’t…”

  “Don’t be stupid,” she interrupted. “Blame Fourstar, don’t blame yourself. And I didn’t say anything that you haven’t said to me.” She studied his face. “When was the last time you had something to eat?” she asked him.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. A while, I guess.” She sho
ok her head. “Come on.”

  Rose had set up her field kitchen in the employee cafeteria. Jax got him a cup of hot soup to drink and he took it, though he didn’t really feel hungry. He couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten. Maybe breakfast—he seemed to remember eating toast. But that could have been yesterday. The days blurred together. His body ached, but he didn’t really feel tired. He couldn’t feel tired; he had to keep fighting. The war was his responsibility, and he could not rest.

  The only light was sunlight shining through dusty windows. People moved through the gloom, talking quietly. He sat at a table with Jax and some of the others. Jax smiled and touched his hand. In the dim light, she seemed less than real. He could almost believe that she was a ghost, that they were all ghosts, nothing more than dreams of the city.

  “The ghosts were out in force today,” Zatch said, as if echoing Danny-boy’s thoughts. “I saw the Chinese New Year’s parade going down Market Street this morning. An army patrol practically got run down by a couple of lion dancers. The soldiers really freaked when the firecrackers started going off.”

  “The city’s doing what it can,” someone else murmured. “I saw a stampede of buffalo heading for City Hall. Must have been a hundred of them, charging down Fulton Street.”

  “Those were real,” Jax said. “Randall’s pack chased them from the park, nipping at their heels the whole way.”

  “I hear a couple of soldiers tried to stand their ground and just about got trampled.” Danny-boy recognized Snake’s voice, though he could not make out his face in the dim light. “That’s the bit I like. When they decide that something must be a ghost and it turns out to be real.”

  “Most of them are shooting at everything now. If it moves, they shoot it,” Jax said. “Cotta watch your ass.”

  “True enough. But that has a fortunate side effect: sometimes they shoot each other.” Snake’s voice was filled with black amusement.

  “Any fatalities?” Jax asked.

  “Not yet. Unfortunately, they’re lousy shots.”