Going Shogun (13 page)

It works.

When the impact happens, a
gale-force burst of air escapes the BA like the
ka-chunk harrumph
of the
gases escaping the end of his pistol barrel.  It dislodges from his hand and
goes scampering across the floor and underneath a table.  The two women sitting
there jump, as if a mouse just ran under their feet.

The man in the blue shirt looks up
at me, startled, out of breath, and tries to draw in a barrel chest full of
air, but it’s tempered with gaping gasps, a fish out of its bowl.

I’ve gone too far beyond Article 1
to care anymore.  I bring a fist up, and then down on his face.

The other one.  Up, and then down.

I am going shogun.

Time and again.  And again, and
again. 

I have pole-vaulted across all
legalities, and
I-do-not-care-anymore.

Simple.  Basic.  You hurt my friend,
I hurt you.

I am going shogun.

But it’s bigger than that.  This is
insurgence against the Almighty Board, and I can feel it.  The rage.  The
fight. 

The
fighting back
.

I bring a fist up, and then down.

Deep inside, I know The Board is too
big, too in control.

Those of us down here in the valleys
of oppression, we may not ever win the war, but I’m sure as hell going to win
this battle.

I bring a fist up, and then down. 
Up, and then down.

And just when I think I can’t throw
another punch, someone pulls me off.  It has to be a bigger somebody, because
Forklift hasn’t moved and I know Bingo isn’t large enough to heave me aside
with this much strength.  I glance up, ready to wail on my attacker, only to
see a white-haired, ponytailed man with wire-rimmed specs, a cotton-ball
goatee, and a tie-dyed shirt.  He looks like the beachy singer Tommy Buffett, and
he’s so anti-establishment in the very nature of his presence that he
has
to be the R10 Rebel.

“
Enough!
” he bellows, and
follows it with a more soothing, “...enough.”  Hand out, palm facing me, easing
me out of my ferocity.

“But I’m going sho—”

“I know, son.  I know.  But you
bastards are getting too much blood on my floor.”

Chapter
10

The R10 Rebel, who tells us his real
name is Ray Kinzel, is a wizard at crowd control. 

After successfully convincing (read:
bribing) everyone in the restaurant to keep their mouths shut and herding them
out the door, (He says, “Free meals, next ten visits,”) after successfully
tying a tip-top tourniquet to temper
Flo #1
’s
bleeding, he gets
Flo
#2
to take her to a dropdown doctor friend of his that Rescinded to R11-3
years ago, and after getting me to help him rope up the man in the tattered blue
shirt in the back room, he stands with his arms crossed, surveying his work.

He doesn’t ask questions.  Doesn’t
seem to care.  There’s a crisis, it needs a resolution, and that’s it. 

Bingo has courageously offered to
help
Flo #3
clean up the blood, so she’s out in the main dining area.  It’s
an enormous task, and even though my left ear is ringing and muffled, through
my right I can hear that they’ve turned up this electronica bebop band called Horde
of the Rings to help them through their job.

Forklift is rubbing his neck.  Voice
hoarse from the previous bicep-vice, he says, “Crazy, Brick.  Crazy.  I watched
you do it.  You hit him, he hit the floor.  Big time sugar.”

Ray grins.  “I saw it too. 
Unbelievable.  You were practically levitating.”

Forklift nods.  “Elevation with the
levitation.”

Ray says, “So much strength and
power.  He’s gotta outweigh you by thirty pounds.”

It’s odd that we’re standing here,
the three of us, hanging out.  Shooting the breeze.  What the R10 Rebel
should
be doing instead is launching us out of his restaurant like we were strapped to
the bottom of a Branson Space Tour jet. 

But he’s not.  He’s sedated.  Almost
proud, even.  Like his boy done good.

We watch the man in the tattered
blue shirt drip a mixture of saliva and blood down his chest as his head hangs. 
It’s thick, syrupy.  Knocked out cold, and he’s jerking his legs now and again
and grumbling.  It reminds me of my parents’ beagle, this faithful, scrappy
hound named Luke, and how he used to sleep in front of the television, growling
and chasing whatever animal was running away in his delightful doggie dreams.

Sleep
. 

Jesus.  Sleep would be nice.  My
body is shutting down from exhaustion, from overspent energy, from stress, but my
head is miles and eons away from a soft pillow.

We’re in a small addition built onto
the back of this tin can
Diner
, and there are plenty of comfy-looking
booths in the room around us.  I’d love to ball up into one and nap for the
rest of mankind’s days, but we have work to do.

I say, “What now?”  I have this
sensation that something is over, at least for the moment, yet I have no idea
as to what comes next.

Forklift, the guy who wouldn’t shut
up at his own funeral, is silent.  Whether it’s because it hurts to talk, or he
doesn’t have any idea either, he doesn’t say anything.  Maybe we’re both
waiting on Ray, the R10 Rebel, this older, wiser, mythical sage to come up with
a plan to get us out of this mess.

Close calls like this should be a
sign, shouldn’t they?  We’ve had too many of them this evening to keep pushing
forward with this ludicrous plan.  We’re not ready for the big time.  We’re not
ready to step Off Paper.

But where is the turning point? 
Where do you turn back and go
whoa
,
what was I doing?

As much as I should be, I don’t
think I’m there yet.  We’ve made it this far.  Something keeps saving us.  It
may simply be an old woman with a plate of spaghetti that’s our savior, but
something
is looking out for us, telling us to keep going.

Ray says, “I’m not the killin’ kind,
but I have an idea.”

“Brain wipe?” Forklift half-asks,
half-jokes. 

“Yup,” says the R10 Rebel, as if
Forklift merely suggested we tie the guy’s shoelaces together.  “Something
simple.  Erase the man’s memory.  We pump this gentleman full of enough Whiz
Sticks and Pop Roxy, tomorrow morning he won’t know where he spent last night.”

Forklift produces a couple bottles
of pills and some silly looking straws from within that magical pocket inside
his gi.  “Adequate armament?” he asks.

Ray laughs.  “Don’t worry about it,
son.  Keep yours.  I’ve got enough stashed around here that this jackass BA
won’t even remember that he works for The Board by the time I’m done with him. 
But, I gotta ask you one thing before I risk everything I’ve Rescinded for...”

Here it comes
. 

Up until now, it’s been crowd
control, craziness containment, corporeal camaraderie, while we get everything
into a manageable situation.  He never asked what was happening or why.  He
helped when help was needed.  And now he needs to know what this was all
about. 

Can I blame him?  No.  Do I
want
to tell him?  Yes.

Will I?  No.

I’m not flying high like a bird in
the sky on a bunch of Waybacks like I was with Bingo, but I’m still ramped up,
adrenalin shooting through my veins like quarks in a particle accelerator,
after beating the ever-living shit out of  a Board Agent...

...
you don’t go up against a
Board Agent...

...but I’m under control.

So I say, “Yeah?” prepared to lie.

Ray’s question is unexpected.  “What
did it feel like?”

The answer is easy.  And I don’t
even need to think about it.

“Good,” I say.  “Goddamn good.”

Forklift lets go of his neck long
enough to pat me on the back.

The R10 Rebel takes this in, turns
one corner of his mouth into a half-smile, and holds up his hand for a high five.

Such an unassuming gesture it is,
the high five.  It could be an involuntary reaction to the phrase, “That girl’s
got a nice ass,” or it could be congratulatory approval after hitting a
three-point shot over an R10 that’s six inches taller than you, or it could be
conjoined elation after scoring a 39% tip on an order of Butter Tea Brownies
from a table of R5 stockbrokers.

Or it could mean
You did
something I could never, ever do.  And I’m proud of you, son.

Instead of verbalizing it, the R10
Rebel says, “Fork.  Brick.  By the looks of you two, you’ve got somewhere to
be.  Now if you gentlemen don’t mind, I’d like to enjoy this in private.  I’ve
had enough run-ins with these sons-of-bitches that it’d be nice to savor
watching one of them be downright out of control for the next few hours.  I’ll
dump him over in Leyerzaph Square when I’m done with him.”  Something sinister
simmers under the surface and I’m tempted to be my typical mitigating self and
tell him not to take it too far.  But, if Whiz Sticks and Pop Roxy can do
everything they’re supposed to, the man in the tattered blue shirt won’t care,
and won’t remember, in any case.  Hell, he might even be begging for more of
it.

I let it go. 

I let a lot of things go.  More
often than I should.  People do what they want to do, with or without my wisdom.

While Ray may have a little bit of a
sadist sitting inside him, he’s doing us a favor that I’m not about to
decline.  We need to be as far away from this place as possible while a loose
end gets sewn up.  I can sense Forklift about to object, because after all, he
was the one that narrowly missed finding out what the omnipresent light is at
the end of the tunnel.  I take a handful of his gi and guide him toward the
main dining room before he can say anything.  He balks at the doorway, and I
pause for a second.  Forklift turns back to the R10 Rebel, says, “Commander!” then
clicks his boot heels together, stands at attention, and salutes the man.

Ray salutes back, and I wonder if
we’ll ever see him again.  Under the right circumstances, he seems like the
kind of guy you’d want playing an acoustic guitar and seducing the ladies
around a campfire.  Maybe one of these days, we can invite him over to Dream
Chasers and enjoy restaurant-owner war stories and laugh at patrons behind
their backs.

No time for that now though. 

We need to be on the move. 
Should’ve been on the move long ago.

Out in the dining area, Bingo and
Flo
#3
are swiping up the last of the remnants, next to a mini-mountain of
blood-mottled rags.  A couple of buckets and mops sit nearby holding dirty
brown water. 
Flo #1
’s white, blood-speckled shoe, which must have been
part of her uniform, is lying on its side like a dying white rabbit.

Down the rabbit hole
. 
Damn it, we still have to go
find LX
.

I’m tired, Bingo looks beat, and for
once in his life, Forklift appears to resemble a normal human.  He’s usually so
jazzed up that you’d expect his heart to explode inside his chest.  Instead, he
looks like he could use a nap.

Bingo says, “Everything okay back
there?”

“Ray has it all under control,” I
answer.  “That BA won’t remember his mom’s name come morning, and all this will
be some horrible ass dream.”

Forklift, trying to make light of the
situation, says, “Would that be a
horrible-ass
dream, or a horrible
ass
dream
?  Because those are two different things.”

Even when he speaks regularly, he’s
so far out there that we can’t help but laugh.  Even
Flo #3,
who is so
bloody from cleaning that she looks like she got shot herself, can’t stop laughing.

I ask, “Is the first Flo going to
make it?  How bad was the wound?”

Bingo says, “She was lucky.  Bullet
passed through the inside of her thigh, missed the artery, went into that booth
behind us.  See the hole?”

I look and see a frayed, gaping orifice
in the upholstery.

Forklift manages to deduce the
ramifications before the rest of us.  He checks the back of the booth and I
follow suit.  There’s no exit hole.  He says, “Procure monsieur a butter slicer,
homeslicer.  Damn sure no birds will be eating away at these breadcrumbs.”

He’s referring to that story about
Handsome and Gretchen, where they try to leave themselves a path home but get
lost because the birds ate their trail. 

Wait, Handsome and Gretchen? 
Hansel?  Greta?

Ah, hell, who cares?  I know what he
means.  I’m tired.  So tired.  My trivia bank is running on empty.

The fact that the Board Agent fired
his weapon will not stay quiet for long.  If the other BAs come looking, and
find the round buried in the soft, yellow foam of the booth cushion, underneath
the red polyester, which is strangely evocative of Wishful Thinking’s
Peppermint-Coated Scallop Roll, they’ll have a bread crumb to follow.  A gun,
(a bleep bleeping bleeepity bleeping
gun
) was fired here, and they’ll
know something went down.  And people will talk.  Receipts will be pulled,
names gathered, people will be questioned.  “
Where were you the night of
blah blah blah?  Who did you see here the night of blah blah blah?  Were there two
women with pink mohawks here?  Was there a kerfuffle with a bucktoothed
gentleman in a white karate gi?
”