Going Shogun (12 page)

The restaurant goes mime. 

It’s so quiet, I can hear the
rubbery squeak of Forklift’s combat boots on the floor as he struggles to get
away.  The sound is peppered amongst his groans and gurgles, his slobbery mess
of a mouth, as he’s being choked out with a headlock.  The man in the blue
shirt is silently holding on, cinching the crook of his arm tighter and tighter
around Forklift’s neck.  I’m sure that if he would stop the struggle long
enough, the BA would be reading him his Rights of Demotion, for whatever
offense he’s officially committed.

Everyone stares.  Everyone is
frozen.  We might as well be figures in one of those things they used to call a
Wax Museum.  We all know, everybody knows, you don’t go up against a Board
Agent.

You don’t go up against a Board
Agent
. 

I feel like I’ve been slammed in the
chest by the mighty Hammer of Thor.  There’s nothing I can do.  I jokingly
wiped some nasty goo on Forklift’s leg and now, my friend, my buddy, my partner
in crime is on his way out, heading for night-night and I’m powerless.  I’ve
never felt this level of helplessness before that’s sitting in my stomach. 
It’s heavy, fat, balled up in my gut like I ate two pounds of Wishful
Thinking’s Salsa-Dipped French Toast.

I.  Can’t.  Do.  Anything.

Can I?  Do I let this just happen? 
Is this where it all falls apart?  Forklift gets busted for, well, for being
All That Is Forklift, they possibly make the connection to LX’s place and we’re
toast, and Bingo is toast by association.

She touches my arm and I jump,
shocked out of my immobilized stupor.  She pleads, “Chris, he’s killing him.”

“I have to do something,” I say.

You don’t go up against a Board
Agent
.

I make another decision in the beat
of a hummingbird’s wings. 

I stand and yell, “Hey!  Asshole!” 

I’m shocked at the command my own voice
has over the restaurant’s graveyard silence.  There’s a distinct
swish
of skin against cotton and polyester and nylon as fifty heads turn in unison to
see who the idiot is that managed to speak up.

The man in the blue shirt stares up
at me, face flat, emotionless.  He’s robotic, programmed to do one thing, and
that’s follow the Board’s Ultimate Directive...

Preserve Control.

Keep the power from the people. 
Keep them sedentary and sedated.  Keep them under a thick thumb for so long,
they won’t even realize that fighting back
is
an option.

I don’t know what to do now.  I
didn’t make plans beyond calling the guy an asshole. 

But this is it.  This is my moment. 
Every eye in the room is painting me with lasers of doubt and disbelief.  I
have to react.  I have to keep moving forward.  It’s too late to sink back into
my seat and await the inevitable arrest, too late to keep being a coward.

Nobody ever stands up to a Board
Agent.  Nobody.  It doesn’t happen.

I take a faltering step toward him. 

The man in the blue shirt tightens
his squeeze on Forklift who’s turning bright red.  He’s doing more than choking
him out, and if it keeps up much longer, there might not be a Forklift left.  He
lets go with one hand long enough to point at me and say, “Resident, you will
stand down at once or face the sanctions of Article Twenty-Three.”

I think,
Okay, Article
Twenty-Three isn’t so bad.

Article Twenty-Three is Minor Crimes
Against the State, and it’s nothing more than a broad catch-all for everything
from resisting arrest to speeding.  (Or a Drunk In Public.  But it means P-time
and we might as well razzle-dazzle our plans into the trashcan because it’ll be
all for naught if we have to start out at -
459.67°F
again.
)  It’s the lowest of the offenses,
so it’s evident that this Board Agent has no idea what we’ve been up to this
evening, which means he didn’t check in to get a heads up before approaching
Forklift.  It’s a good sign.

But, once he calls it in, it turns
us into a bigger blip on The Board’s radar.  If they’re looking for us because
they think we’re guilty for what happened at LX’s place, then they’ll know
where we are.  Exactly where we are, in this restaurant.

Shit.  Okay, he has to be stopped
before he has a chance to notify his headquarters.

As I’m ruminating, planning,
thinking, trying to work up the courage to take one more step closer, to my
right I hear, “Let him go.” 

It’s a tentative voice, but there’s
some authority in there, and then I remember that this place is full of
Rescinders.  I look over and see a small man with big, thick glasses and a
hearty caterpillar mustache rising from his table.  The woman beside him has
total terror in every molecule on her face.  She reaches to pull him back down
and he shrugs her away.  “You’re hurting him,” he says, his voice vibrating,
but with more stability this time.

A little old lady next to me croaks,
“Quit that,” at the Board Agent, like she’s scolding a child, as her words roll
out over a gravelly voice that’s coated with too many years of smoking.  Others
in the room begin to stand, or nod in agreement, or lift up their words from
where they sit.  Shouts of “Stop it!” and “You’re going to kill him,” are being
thrown at the BA.

The solemnity softens on his face
and I’m guessing he doesn’t know how to respond to this group of underlings
scoffing at his supposed bad-assery.  He’s probably never seen anything like
it.  This little mini-rebellion. 

Forklift’s kicks, his struggles, his
attempts to fight his way free are leaking out of him and he’s either getting
ready to pass out, or
pass on
to the Great Bucktoothless Beyond.

Here we go.  Ascension be damned, be
damned, be damned.

I raise my voice higher than
everyone else in the room and scream, “If you want out of this restaurant
alive,
let go
!”  And then I follow it up with a strained and awkward,
“Sir!” 

I realize immediately that I’ve
overstepped when the Mute button is pushed on the shouting crowd.  They know. 
They grasp that I went too far.  I shouldn’t have chosen those exact words,
because the man in the blue shirt, this off-duty BA that was probably looking
for a simple midnight snack and wound up stepping into some unexpected shit,
now knows that he’s regained control and I’ve lost command of the situation. 

By threatening his life, I catapulted
myself from Article 23 to Article 1, Direct Threat Against the Sovereignty of
the State. 

Which is longhand for Treason.

Which has a sentence of Immediate
Death Upon Capture or Attempted Escape.  Board Agents are given this Ultimate
Authority when Article 1 is violated.

But what am I supposed to do, let
him kill Forklift?

Making it to R10, Dream Chasers,
climbing out of The Routine, it’s not worth it.

It’s my turn to risk my life for
him.  Twice in one night, this happens.  Each of us putting our neck down on
the incontrovertible, immutable, indisputable chopping block of crucial risk
for a friend you care about.  In this instance, given that Board Agents are the
only human beings left in the U.S. that are allowed to have guns, I may get an
opportunity to take a bullet for him.

The man in the blue shirt lets go of
Forklift, who flops to his side, coughing and hacking, taking deep diaphragm
breaths.  He stands with a sneer on his face.  He probably hasn’t gotten to
shoot anyone in a while since the practice is typically discouraged.

He cracks his knuckles, and if I
wasn’t the one standing in front of him, getting ready to nosebleed from a
manmade hole, I would probably chuckle at how stupidly cliché the gesture is.

But, I don’t have the luxury of
being smug.  I have to figure out how I’m going to spend the last thirty
seconds of my wretched existence, because I see no way out of this one.  I
don’t have any weapons.  I don’t have anything to fight back with.  I didn’t
even bring a knife to a gun fight, I brought a loud voice and no
follow-through.  If I reach for a fork as a weapon, I’m dead before my hand
makes it to the table.  If I lunge at the man in the blue shirt, I’m dead
before I lift my second foot of the ground.

I can hear Bingo shuffling in the
seat behind me and I’m thinking,
Please, God, don’t.  Stay where you are,
don’t move, don’t move, don’t try anything
.

The Board Agent takes a couple of
steps closer.  Since this is one of the last faces I’ll see, I become acutely
aware of his features.  Broad nose, oddly angled, probably broken a few times. 
Slicked-back blond hair, receding, like any good goon in a film should have.  A
small diamond stud in his left ear, which he’s
definitely
not allowed to
wear while he’s on duty.  There’s a short but deep pink scar on the front of
his neck, maybe from a recent thyroid surgery or throat cancer operation.  It
looks like one of Wishful Thinking’s Steak Tartar Lady Fingers.

All I want, all I can do is
wish
so very hard that I was looking at anything else other than this power-hungry
freak’s ridiculous face.

I can’t count on Forklift to come
flying out of nowhere like he did against the supercharged highboys earlier,
because he’s on the ground, gagging, clawing his way back from an early grave
and a trip to the Corpus Compendium.  Bingo would have to somehow hurdle me and
latch onto the man in the blue shirt from above, like a Rhesus monkey jumping
on King Kong.

When I see him reach sideways for
the butt of his firearm, and when he flicks the holster snap open, internally,
I give up.  I’ve violated Article 1 without even thinking, and I’m done for. 

I’ll be honest here, I feel a little
pee dribble out.

There’s a whispering sound of metal
on leather as the BA slides his firearm from its sheath.

I always thought that feeling your
heart sink was an expression, but it’s not, it feels like it’s jackhammering
its way through my intestines.

And then, by the grace of whatever
is Holy, the work of some stranger’s hand rectifies the situation. 

The man in the blue shirt’s face shatters
into a pile of gooey, slithering, tomato-filled madness as a plate of spaghetti
crashes against the side of his head.  It comes from somewhere to my left, his
right, and I have a snapshot recollection of the croaking old woman gnawing on
a meatball earlier.  Was it her?

I’m reminded of the highboy’s temple
exploding when The Minotaur popped him with the slingshot pellet.  Again, I’m
saved at the last moment.  Once is fortunate, twice is too many.

He roars.

It’s just enough of a distraction
for me to go rocketman on him.  He’s bigger than me, but thankfully I have a
few pounds under my belt, and I hit him with enough force to lift him from the
ground, my right shoulder lodged under his sternum.  Up and out, Mass times
Velocity equals Momentum, and I drive him down, down, down.

I suppose it’s an instinctual response,
a reactive-clench, but as we’re flying slo-mo through the air, his gun goes off
beside my left ear and a light fixture shatters above us.  It’s not close
enough to damage my hearing—I think—but the sound around me goes dull.  I’m
able to hear shouts and screams but they’re muffled, like we’re all underwater,
like they’re shouting at me from beneath a pile of snow.  The thick wall of
anti-hearing is pierced by a screeching, high-pitched tone.  It’s tinnitus on an
entire bottle of Muscle Man August Pureza’s SuperRoid pills. 

We’re floating, ever so slowly,
coming down now, letting gravity do its job.  The BA’s arm flies outward to
catch his fall and the gun
kabooms
again.  I realize that I’ve probably
never heard a gun fire in real life and note that they don’t sound anything
like the toys those R6 Board Agents shoot on
White Hearts
.  It doesn’t
even sound like the weapon that comes out of Maxine’s robot arm when her owners
are in “trouble” and need her “help.”

What
does
sound real,
however, is the muffled
GAAHAHHAHAAAH!
that's ululating out of the first
Flo’
s mouth.  She’s holding her thigh, now wet and red with blood.  It’s
inexplicable how much I’m aware of, how much is registering, in such a short amount
of time.  There’s the pressure of my shoulder pressing against the man in the
blue shirt’s chest.  Glass shards are falling around me.  I feel a dizzying
sensation from having my feet slightly above my head as I’m airborne.  I can
smell the spaghetti that’s clinging to his face. 

Then there’s
Flo #1
again,
her warbling, and the blood.  The red, ever so deeply darkened red, red blood.

But I don’t have time to focus on
that, because the ground is coming up faster now.  Except there’s no landing
gear.  No soft grass to break our fall.  No cushy mattress to bounce off of
when you’re roughhousing with your brother.  Just that hideous, hard, yellow-tiled
floor that reminds me of Wishful Thinking’s Key Lime Wasabi Bars and was
probably laid by a hard working R11-1 journeyman.

I pivot as much as I can, making
sure as much weight as possible is under that pressure point in the center of
his chest.