Sherwood Nation (54 page)

“What? Oh. Yes—thank you.” He fitted the stems of the other glasses between his knuckles and sipped from his new drink. “I was supposed to be saving this for somebody.”

“Oh,” she said, and he could tell he’d not said the right thing. She turned at an angle and stared out toward the party. She looked lovely. Not in the dress he’d imagined her in, alas no, but government-worker-of-the-future pretty.

Then he understood. It was like they were at a high school mixer, and he’d forgotten how to do all this. “No, I mean it’s for my father, the person’s this was, was my father’s,” he said.

She tilted her head and smiled. “Cheers.” She clinked her cup into his.

The cheers bumped a dollop of champagne out of his glass and onto his shoe and he looked down at it trying to keep his balance. He wished this were all done with, the chatting, the awkward, he wished they were in a quiet spot together, where he wouldn’t have to try to barge any more words up the inebriated passage of his throat.

“Listen—I’d really like to sit down, got to sit down really soon here . . . want to find a place?” He turned toward the door, unable to wait for her answer, realizing with some suddenness that actually he
hated
champagne and the seasick, puke-in-the-mouth sensation it generated. He wanted to put his head against a pillow and let the room spin itself out. If he were there with an undressed woman, all the better, though the complications seemed too—
well
—complicated.

“You did a really great job on that interview,” she said and miraculously she followed him as he moved toward the doorway. “I was worried for you. At first you looked so scattered and innocent. And then when you looked at the camera for a long time?”

“Yeah, people say I did that. I don’t remember it.” Jamal got his hand on the door frame and turned around to smile at her, to let her know he was still involved in the conversation before making his next foray.

Zach and Maid Marian passed them coming in. They looked as if they’d been fighting and Jamal idly wondered if that meant Maid Marian’s room would be available. First Maid Marian and then Zach shouted out something but it was unintelligible to Jamal. He could barely understand the man when he was sober. Then the two hurried out past them.

“You catch that?” he said.

“No,” she said and laughed.

“That guy’s brain is a quackmire. Quagmire, I mean. They’re dating, you know.”

“Ooh, Sherwood gossip.” She locked her arm through his and they turned toward the exit again, and he thought, is this all there was to it? Perhaps he’d been too daft to figure it out before, perhaps the whole nation was simply pairing up and saying they’d like to go off some place together and locking arms and
voilà.

At the hallway he stared up the row of doors and tried to focus. It was wrong to sleep in Maid Marian’s bed, but he remembered Bea had a bed in that room, and she was passed out on the couch. “You wouldn’t think it too forward?” he said. “I’ve had a bit to drink and—”

She leaned in and kissed him and then the world erupted. There was a brief moment of consciousness as he inhaled dust and his hearing went static before he passed out. He was trapped under something heavy, still interlinked with the Ranger who’d kissed him, and where there’d been ceiling and party goers he now saw, through dust and a thousand Sherwood notes like snow in the air, stars.

Watching the party up in the map room from the backyard made Gregor feel uneasy. Celebrating a victory in such a manner was to be overly proud and oblivious. It was because his Rangers had been so afraid, he knew, and they had done well. He knew better than to interfere with such victory dances, and yet for himself, he enjoyed it rather more
from the dust yard, it turned out, far away.

And then he heard the vehicles. He crouched to the ground and watched in horror in the dim light as the the soldiers quickly assembled and began to fire on Sherwood headquarters.

There was a terrific explosion and a section of the house fell away. Gregor sank to his knees as if a blow had been dealt him personally. So this is the end, he thought. There were screams coming from the house and people pouring out and the sound of gunfire.

Gregor had left without his gun and wore civilian clothes as usual. He eased back into the trees. This was not a battle he could win. There was no glory in this.

In the dark from deep in the backyard, on the other side of HQ’s garden, he watched what he’d helped build destroyed. It was a familiar feeling. There were people in there he loved. A son, young and energetic and overly optimistic. There was Maid Marian, their temporary ruler and his strange and fascinating partner in this venture. He supposed in their short time together he’d begrudgingly come to love her. There was a government he’d helped create, and yet all along he’d known it was impossible, had he not?

“You bastards,” he breathed out silently. They could not let it stand. People destroy things that work. Nothing lasts. Only him, apparently—in some better universe he would have been in the map room and taken that shell and died there in celebration with a sense that hope was possible. What a feeling that would have been. Instead, he was always the fucking survivor, left to battle his way through hell. Now, truly, there was nothing to live for.

He
had
felt hope, though, he realized suddenly, even as he anticipated its demise. He’d felt it here. He felt it come rushing around him like a deflating balloon, even as it was leaving, something he’d only vaguely known was there until now.

Another blast hit the house and the terrain was briefly illuminated. He exhaled and felt like his heart had been gouged out. How he was a hollow man once again. He could not fight this fight. A Ranger ran by him and Gregor reached out and caught his arm, his grip causing the man to cry out.

“Can you signal?” he said.

“General! They—”

“Signal immediately for all Rangers to shed their uniforms. Headquarters has been taken.”

The Ranger was jittery and drunk and scared out of his mind and Gregor couldn’t tell if he’d heard him.

“Understand?” Gregor shook the man.

The fighting was coming their way and a bullet decapitated the top of a corn stalk in the Sherwood garden a few feet from them. Gregor increased his grip on the man until he focused.

The Ranger nodded.

“And tell them everybody meets armed and on bicycle tomorrow at the old Safeway at noon. You got this?”

“But—” The man was a panicked animal, his eyes wild, and Gregor wasn’t sure one message in his mind might not ricochet the other out.

“Go on, get out of here. Signal as many times as you can. Watch your back.”

After the man ran off, Gregor turned and watched for a few more seconds. They were dragging people out of the house and cuffing them, jamming them into the back of a bus. The whole thing had been trivial. There was sporadic fire in the distance, but it had the feel of being over. They were not prepared for this—they’d never been prepared for this type of conflict. Gregor thought of the great water tanks beneath him, of the wealth lost. Of the garden in front of him, a sparkling jewel of green in a brown city. He wished they’d distributed it out to the people now. They should have been more generous while they could.

He turned and walked out the path Bea had made some time ago. Through fences and across other yards. There were people everywhere running, yelling amidst the gunshots. He walked without looking from side to side, he walked straight, the walk of the tin man, the purpose of a machine. The streets were chaotic at first, but within a dozen blocks he was back in the land of a sleeping populace, unaware that their country had changed overnight. That they would wake to city rule.

It was a long way home, some fifty blocks. Gregor picked up his pace.

At home Gregor paced through his household chores. He felt the moment he stopped moving he was at danger of turning to stone. Everything that bound him together was gone, and so he would rely on the inertia of routine to be the glue, that and revenge.

He had a unit gallon of water fresh from the morning’s water carrier, when there was still Sherwood, and a meager stash of two more gallons. Everything else he’d stored away he’d given to the nation. He didn’t know what would happen tomorrow. He could not show his face at a water distribution point. The city knew him. With a start he realized they would come look for him at his house, and being second in charge they would do so immediately. He was not thinking clearly.

Less dreaming, old man, more cunning, he told himself. He’d noticed himself slipping easily into reveries of late, thinking about the dead: his wife and other boy, the times he’d had when he was younger. Before Maid Marian had come to him, his life had been in contraction. He’d been winding things down. Thinking about the end of times, of quitting business, of enjoying ceremony and what few friends and family he had. What he wouldn’t give for a cup of tea with someone quiet right now. His wife, for example.

He gathered a backpack. His load was uncomfortably heavy with his three unit gallons, a spare gun he kept for just this sort of circumstance, food and a few items. He slung his backpack on and exited through the back door. The night was a perfect summer night: stars and temperate and quiet. A vehicle pulled up to the front of his house. He shook his head in anger at himself, too close and too lucky. He wouldn’t always be able to depend upon his luck like this. He was too old to run from them, carrying a heavy bag. He needed his wits to put him far ahead on the playing field. He was not a runner by nature, having, for one, grown a paunch, and two, always been of the mind that one does not flee one’s troubles. He stood for a moment at the back fence of his yard. He steeled himself for a clumsy, rattly ascent over and then he said to hell with it and waved dismissively at the fence and that future of awkward flight. Why go against what you’re best at?

He was a predator and he knew it. He was the eagle and the tiger, he was the tank, and trying to play the fat, aged field mouse would only get him killed sooner, or at least killed in a far less dignified way. He turned back toward his house, the only way to the street not over a fence, and trudged up the back steps, drawing his gun. It was loaded and ready. A predator is always ready.

Inside there was a racket like a rhino had been set loose. There were streaks of light as headlamp beams pulsed through the house, searching him out. Three or maybe four, he guessed, trying to shake off their fear by the noise they were making.

He entered the kitchen simultaneously with a Guardsman, but from opposite ends. The headlamp flooded light over him and he squinted against its brightness, the light like some alien tractor beam. The idiot was wearing no helmet, Gregor realized.

“Put the gun down!” the Guardsman yelled.

It angered him, seeing them in his own kitchen, after all they’d taken already. His only thought was to sweep the house clean of them, like some infestation that he was in charge of exterminating. This will be easy, Gregor thought, and put a hole through the center of the headlamp. The room immediately fell back into a peaceful darkness, and he squatted down while his eyes adjusted back to it. Just shoot the lights out. It’s like being a kid all over again, removing street lamps one by one until whole neighborhoods lie under blankets of darkness. The man fell heavily to the floor, the light gone black. At once there was shouting from various locations in his house, all of them eager, apparently, to let him know where they were.

“Sorry!” Gregor hollered, “just an accident.” Hunkered down next to the body he remembered the execution, and could see in his mind Jamal’s face. The temptation loomed to simply tread through the house blinking off the lives of other men; the desire for revenge made this easy. But—and here Gregor allowed to seep into him some small kernel of emotion, for the fate of Jamal and the others. Much harder was avoiding that temptation. He would do what he could, he thought, to avoid this digression. Some settlement between the nature that came easy and that which came hard. He shucked his pack with a heavy thump and walked toward the front door. He could walk this house blind. They might as well put targets on their heads.

His hand closed over the doorknob. He heard someone upstairs, in the private lair of his family, and it irked him horribly to think of a man up there where his boys had grown up.

He sighed heavily, and climbed slowly to the top of the stairs. The glow of the man’s light came from one of the rooms down the hall. “Robert, we need your help!” Gregor shouted down the hallway.

“There is no Robert,” came the voice finally from Jamal’s room.

Gregor leaned against the wall of the hallway and felt the wallpaper on his cheek in the dark. It was paisley, purple the dominant color, and he’d hated it since the moment his wife had installed it in 1994, a few years past a brief cultural foray into the design. He’d half-heartedly meant to update it. He’d gone through several purges of her stuff, conflicted over losing another physical manifestation of her, and yet wishing the items would decease in the haunting of him. But mostly, wallpaper was a hard thing to get around to.

“OK,” Gregor said, “Billy, Danny, Jimmy, Whitey on the moon, I killed your buddy and now I’ve got nothing left to do. I don’t care if you kill me or not, which leaves you, presumably, at a disadvantage, am I right?”

There was no answer, and on a whim Gregor licked the wallpaper, wishing for one last taste of his wife, her mouth, the salt of her, the way she tasted after a bath, but instead it was an aged, dried glue taste and he wished he’d refrained.

“I’ve got to go now, Robert. If I let you live you have to clean up the body. That’s the deal. That’s all I ask. I used to have a housekeeper, you know. Though she wasn’t, you know, this committed. Can I get a confirmation?”

“Oh and hey,” he said, “who’s got the keys anyway?” The troublesome details of logistics. He was too tired to wait around for the young to make up their minds. “Are you in there pissing yourself or what?” He could do this. Just walk away, he told himself. Leave him here in the inside, in Jamal’s room. He turned and walked toward the stairs. He didn’t hear so much as feel someone enter the hallway behind him and Gregor reached his arm back behind him and fired, and the hallway went dark. It was no surprise to see he’d sent a bullet through this one’s headlamp too. He had a highly developed spatial sense. The spatial sense had made him an accidental predator, in a time of guns, and only upon being thrust into it did his predator’s mind finally form.