Going Shogun (18 page)

What did he mean by get
me
Ascending?

Singular. 
Me
.  Not
us
.

Chapter
13

We decide that it’s not safe to go
back to either of our apartments.  Bingo offers me her couch since she’s not on
Lewis & Clark’s list, not a blip on the Board Agents’ radar, so it’s
possibly safer there than checking into a hotel with our traceable ARP cards,
and Forklift insists that he’s got a lady-in-waiting lying in wait, that he’ll
be fine, maybe let the winky think for the binky. 

How he has the energy to be horny at
a time like this is anybody’s guess.  I assume that it’s one of the
chicas
he’s been on the phone with numerous times tonight, and since my mind is
functioning like I’ve forgotten to change the oil for fifty-thousand miles, I
forget that I meant to question him about the oddness of the calls before we
met up with LX.  And, I wouldn’t want to do it in front of Bingo.  There’s no
sense in bringing her in deeper.  Once we get to her apartment, I’m talking her
out of any further involvement, for sure.

I desperately want to back out and
be done with this senseless scheme after finding out that Lewis & Clark are
using us as bait, but it occurs to me that if we don’t play their game the way
they want it played, Forklift and I both might find ourselves answering a knock
at the door late one evening.

I’m locked in, whether I like it or
not.

The only option at this point is to hope
we can play it better than they can.  Regardless of what Forklift says about
Ascension, I feel like that clichéd ship has sailed (another one we learned
about in class), and we’ve moved well beyond that.  Now it’s about Retaliation. 
Now it’s about going shogun on Lewis & Clark.

They know about us.  Who we are. 
What we’ve been planning.  Where we’ve been, where we were going, who we’ve
been talking to.

How, how, how?  How is it possible
that they could’ve known?  Unless...unless they were tracking LX since they
were after him, too?  Could that be it?

Maybe they had his system hacked or
apartment bugged.  It’s a possibility, but I don’t know where Forklift met with
him to discuss the plans or how much he told him about our motives. 

One thing is certain though, one
simple, ridiculous, unassuming decision botched it all.

If we’d picked a different person to
hack into The Board’s system and drum up a couple of IP addresses for us, none
of this nonsense would’ve ever come to its frightful fruition.  Lots of people
sell things on RollerNinja.  Our plan was harmless to Lewis & Clark and
would’ve made them mountains of money in commissions due to the way people beg
for Dorna’s recipes.  As complicated as it would’ve been, if you break it down
into a single sentence, it was brilliant in its simplicity.  Steal some
recipes, access a stupid website, and sell them to the desperate masses to make
enough money to start a restaurant.   

But just because we picked LX, no,
just because
Forklift
picked LX, we are where we are.  I can’t lay the
blame on him though.  How could he have known that LX, The Minotaur, and Lewis
& Clark were all interconnected?  It had to be Fate or Coincidence.  Fate
or Coincidence.

The level of Fate or Coincidence
that got Board Leader Gerry Johnson busted for sleeping with an underage Dana
Stewart was way more complicated than this.  You’d need every bit of computer
power available to the universe to work out the intricacies involved in that
debacle.  Not even the High Courts were certain that all the right details were
deduced. 

I remember studying the sequence of
events that led up to the Watergate Scandal and the complications of the
Clinton impeachment in my Ineffectiveness of Presidential Rule class, but
neither of them came close to what happened with Gerry Johnson.  As crazy as it
sounds, they traced the beginning of the entire fiasco back to a Scottish
Terrier that had remnants of cocaine in its fur.  The real giveaway there was
the fact that it was actual, real, illegally imported cocaine, not some super-duper,
hyper-bred form of it created in some mad scientist’s lab.  The rest of the
connections and leads and evidence points came together in a more intricate way
than the entire genetic code sequence of the human body.

Our situation only has a couple of
degrees of separation, but we stepped into this humongous pile months ago,
during the exact moment Forklift said, “Got a gonzo buddy that can bebop the
system for a few chickens and a goat.  We’re greasy.”

If only he’d picked a different guy
or had a less-connected hookup, this would’ve been over hours ago, and we’d be
happily floating through our dreamy dreams, safely in our beds.  But, I
wouldn’t have reconnected with Bingo, and Fireball would be serving as my
ever-present infatuation.

Fireball
.

That’s another thing to consider. 
Do I backtrack from the kiss with Bingo?  Do I even want to?  There was an
undeniably incredible sense of
rightness
in that kiss.  Do I want to
razzle-dazzle that into the trashcan and go back to drooling over the cherry
red-haired hottie that I’ve wanted to bed and wed since the very day I started
waiting tables at Wishful Thinking?

The short answer is...I simply don’t
know.

The complicated answer is, how would
I know if things would ever work out between us?  She has no inkling of
information that I was crushing on her, and Forklift is right, I do go glacier
whenever she’s hovering.  Regardless of whether or not inter-level dating is illegal,
I’ve never even hinted to her that I’d like to take her out when she makes
R11-2.

The connection with Bingo is
definite.  Comfortable.  Tranquil.  Tangible. 

But that in itself poses its own
problem.  She’s R11-1, I’m R11-2, and dating her would be illegal as well.  And
mentally, too, I’m North Pole, she’s South Pole.  She’s so against Ascending
that convincing her to even
think about
coming up to R11-2 is as likely
as me applying to AU and getting a full scholarship.

Even with Forklift’s mysterious
assertion that we’ll get
me
Ascending with our current Dream Chasers
plans, in reality, I feel like it’s all fallen into fragmentary piecemeal, like
Wishful Thinking’s Worcestershire Starfruit Crumble Cake.  If it doesn’t work,
if we manage to stay alive, if I really want to Ascend, and if we get out of
this Gordian knot without prison time, I’ll have to come up with other ways and
means, befriend a few higher ranks and ask for a Nomination, or Apply Myself,
or spend the next decade eating leftovers out of the garbage and saving money
to open my own place, with or without Forklift.

Maybe I’ll see where Bingo’s
thoughts are once we’ve gotten a few hours of necessary naptime clocked away. 
Even then, it might need to take a backseat ride, because if I’m sticking with
Forklift on this, we’ve got a lot left to do.

I mean,
a lot
.

Forklift and I have to be at Wishful
Thinking to sling cuisine in less than twelve hours and act like we’re there to
serve a simple shift, then break back into the place once we’ve shut it down,
steal the recipes, find the secret ingredient, and slog back into Urine Town to
deliver them to The Minotaur, who will hopefully have gotten everything ready
for us by then, provided he’s been able to sneak past Lewis & Clark’s traps. 

We’re obligated to tell him what
we’ve learned, but with his ‘AFC’ mantra, I doubt it’ll make much difference,
and he’ll be even more determined to take the bastards down.  I suck at chess,
and whatever move comes after that will have to be left up to Fate and
Forklift, because I can’t see the endgame results from ten moves out.

It’s too much to think about.

Bingo has to go on the backburner. 

***

The rain has stopped, and Forklift
glides through her R11-1 community on streets that remain slick and wet. 
Shining blacktop reflects the signs of illuminated all-night convenience stores
and ever-open laundry shops in deep, dark puddles.  We pass obsolete telephone
poles that were never dug up and removed.  Some of them are charred and blackened
a few feet up, some all the way to the top, because they probably served as
matchstick tinder during The Flame Riots. 

The next relic I see surprises me. 
It’s a blue United States Postal Service mailbox that should’ve been unbolted
from the concrete and tossed into a metal recycling center decades ago, back
when the original government let the system go bankrupt and collapse, even back
before The Board was instituted.

I point it out and ask Bingo why
somebody hasn’t ripped it up and sold the steel, given the current astronomical
price per ounce.

She says, “That’s the last one left
in the city.  It’s legitimately a historical landmark.  I see school busses
there sometimes with groups of kids gathered around it.  The other day, there
was an R5 there with a camera, taking pictures.”

It’s amazing how far society has
come in these last couple hundred years, and explaining how we got here, to
where we are now, today, in this present tick on the timeline of humanity,
where we all live under the Ultimate Directive to Preserve Control, is better
left to real historians, not some naive jackass like me with a degree in
Cultural History. 

I will say that all it takes is one
group of wrong-minded people with a bad idea that, in retrospect, sounded like
a good one at the time.

Forklift is zooming through his second
or third or fourth wind, and he’s chattering on and on in his impenetrable
dialect about the plans for tonight.  How he has the tools to break in, where
he thinks the Top Secret Recipe Book is hiding, what the secret ingredient
might be, how we can’t go geisha, that everything will be where it’s supposed
to be, happen like it’s supposed to happen.  How he thinks we can take out
Lewis & Clark with The Minotaur’s help.  He’s verbally playing through the
chess match move by move by move and in his mind, the game is already won.

I really, really,
really
should be listening, but I don’t have the energy.  I’ve tuned him out, unable
to translate, because I’m so tired I’m almost beyond the point of caring.  He’s
background noise, a DJ on the radio that you ignore until the next song plays,
a Board Member reelection commercial that serves as a bathroom break while
you’re waiting on the next segment of
White Hearts
to return, hoping
that Maxine shows up in time to rescue the hot-for-each-other Board Agents from
whatever super-villain has them tied up in his underground lair in this episode.

Which she will. 

She always does.

***

Forklift drops us off in front of
Bingo’s apartment building, offers a few more words of indecipherable advice
about later tonight, and then revs the engine and fishtails
Machine
all
the way up to the next stop sign.  A repetitive, booming bass begins
reverberating from the car, and the fluorescent lights kick on underneath,
alternating to the rhythm of the beat.  Back in breakdance mode, and plainly
not worried about attracting attention, he rockets away from a dead stop with
enough G-forces for the rear bumper to almost touch the road.

Bingo’s standing there with her arms
crossed, ogling after him in disbelief.  She says, “Don’t get me wrong, I like
Forklift, but why in the hell do you hang out with that guy?”

“Honestly?”

“Honestly.”

“It’s fun.”

“Really?   Fun?  You call tonight
fun?”

“Usually it’s fun.  Tonight’s been...irregular.”

“Old people get irregular.  There
aren’t words for everything that happened tonight.”

I chuckle.  “Very true.  C’mon,
let’s get inside where it’s warm and I’ll attempt an explanation.”

I’ve lost track of time.  It has to
be what, 4 or 5 o’clock on the morning?  Whatever the hour, people are sleeping
and she lives on the third floor, so we tiredly trudge up the stairwell as gently
as we can.

She opens her door and we walk into
the sparsely furnished living room, same as it ever was.  Empty white walls. 
No pictures hanging.  No curios.  Nothing but a couch that has no decorative
pillows, a coffee table, a tall lamp, and a small television sitting on a black
metal-and-glass stand.  The only thing in the entire place with character is the
identical, enticing scent of cotton candy that coated her being earlier this
evening, before the grime of Urine Town, before the grease-coated air of
Diner
,
before the mixture of perspiration and blood from scrubbing
Flo
’s inside
juice off the floor.

She flicks on the light.  We
simultaneously let the tension in our bodies go and flop down onto the soft
cushions.

Spent.

We sit for a while, both staring in
the direction of the blank television screen.  Silent.  Unmoving.  Exhausted
effigies resembling living, breathing beings.

Bingo is first to bring words into
our soundless reverie.

She says, “Did I tell you how
amazing you were in
Diner
?”

“Watching me beat the hell out of a
Board Agent was amazing?”