Sherwood Nation (25 page)

There was a knock and a silhouette appeared in the door’s window. Nevel jumped. He rolled off the couch and crouched, the gun in one hand, trying to make out who it was. He’d already been spotted through the glass.

The door handle shook. “Nevel? I have something for you,” the figure at the door said.

Nevel tucked the gun into the front of his pants where it could be seen, then he tentatively opened the door the width the door chain would allow. The man on the other side slipped an envelope through the crack. Inside was a handwritten note: “Friends don’t forget friends,” it said. He knew the handwriting immediately.

“Open up, we have boxes.”

Nevel unhooked the chain and swung the door open. A short queue of shadows waited behind the man who handed him the note.

“This is my favorite part of the job,” he said gruffly, and Nevel stepped aside to let him in. He had a long mustache and a baseball hat, and looked capable of eating another man’s flesh.

The shadows filed in and put down boxes, which settled onto the wood floor with heavy thuds. They quickly stacked up. There were twenty-five boxes, in all. When they were done, the man with the mustache held his hand out and shook Nevel’s with vigor.

“Enjoy,” he said, and tipped his hat.

After the door closed, he stood over the delivery, bewildered. He cautiously broke the seal on one. Inside there were four full gallon-sized glass bottles and an equivalent portion of food rations. Nevel ran back to the door, but the truck was already gone.

He sat back on the couch and his heart sank as he realized that
this
was how he stood up for his family. Did others in the agency receive the same? He thought not. It was he who knew the mayor’s secrets, and secrets were worth something. Silence was expensive. This shipment was surely a pittance compared to what they were hoarding away for the wealthy, but to him it was a small fortune.

He stood and opened the door to the basement. He needed to get these out of sight before his wife saw them. The boxes were heavy, but in half an hour he had all of it deep in his tunnel, down a side branch, a cache of survival for end times.

Unpacked, they were gorgeous. In the beam of a flashlight he admired his glittering cave of rations. He was sullied now. Cora would be disgusted by these, by his acquiescence to the dirty work of the mayor. But he had a family to look after. He was the provider, and look at this. He swung the beam across the width of the hoard. He craved to fill the rest of the hole with them.

In a moment of sobriety he realized this hole would never stop hungering for its prize. He would have to keep filling it. He extinguished the light and fell to a crouch, each hand steadied on a gallon, and stayed in the dark for he wasn’t sure how long.

After Christopher went to bed and his advisors shuffled
off to their own lives, Mayor Bartlett played video games. He played first person shooters mostly, and he was good. He liked control. It was one of the reasons he’d run for mayor—to be in control—and it was to his great dismay that he realized that the job was constantly out of control, in free fall, like driving a school bus full of vocal citizens down a snowy mountainside with several other would-be drivers wrestling for the steering wheel.

His video game obsession was a poorly kept secret. The city council knew why he’d show up once or twice a week with deeply bloodshot eyes, speaking each sentence as if there were a hairpin turn in the middle of it. He’d received as gifts, over his term, nine copies of games—mostly those that in some way or another resembled his job, SimCity or Civilization—games where you managed a city or developed an economy, and these sat unopened next to his console. He promised himself he’d open them someday. In the meantime, he preferred to shoot things.

On the night that a coffee barista assumed control of approximately one fifth of his city, he decided to spend the night killing Nazis.

“Coming to bed?” Christopher said from the bathroom.

“You go,” the mayor said. “I’ll be in soon.”

“No, you won’t.” Christopher lined his toothbrush with a toothpaste he loathed. The mayor insisted on purchasing it because it was made by a local factory and with local ingredients.

“Please don’t do this,” the mayor said.

“Think about what you’ve got to do tomorrow, that’s all I’m saying.”

“Chris.” The mayor lay down on the couch and put one hand over his face. In his other hand he gripped the console’s controller. “I have fought—screaming matches, really—with pretty much every person I regularly interact with over the course of my day. The only exception being you. And that’s
all
I’m saying.”

“I’m not fighting, ” Christopher called from the bathroom, his speech fuzzy with toothpaste foam.

The last phrase hung in the air, awkward and only vaguely resembling the truth, waiting for one of them to push on it either way until Christopher, finished with his tedious routine of brushing, flossing, face washing, fluoride rinsing, fingernail clipping and face picking, came and stood over the couch where the mayor was collapsed. He put his hand on Brandon’s head and caressed his perfect mayoral hair. The generator kicked on, filling the space with a comforting hum.

“OK,” Christopher said finally, “but don’t stay up too late. Don’t hurt yourself.”

“I might get shot.”

“What?”

The mayor waved the controller weakly in the direction of the television. “Joke,” he said.

“Ah. Do you want to talk about it at all?”

The mayor paged through a few on-screen characters, picking an Allied machine gunner, and then launched the game.

“Talk about what? About riots springing up like sewer rats? That I lost a quarter of the city to a bunch of people wearing pajamas? You know this Maid Marian chick is calling it Sherwood now. Yeah, I’ve talked about it all day and just can’t get enough, you know?”

“Hey,” Christopher said.

“I know, I’m sorry.” The mayor’s Allied soldier charged kamikaze-like into a bunker of Nazis where he dislodged grenade after grenade until they’d shot him full of holes. Blood erupted in a flowering mist, a geysering ketchup across the supposed screen’s camera lens. “Fucking fuck,” the mayor said, but his heart wasn’t in it.

“I don’t understand why you can’t just go in and get her,” Christopher said.

“Oh, Chris. You should play these games. You could shoot things. It’d make you feel better. Believe me, if it were easy and clean to go in and shoot things up, I’d give it some real thought,” the mayor said. “And the council? Look, here they are—” The mayor called up the Axis soldier chooser on the TV and pointed at it: a huffing, serious German gunner swayed dully back and forth, some kind of coffee ground stain across his jaw, an apparent rendering of beard growth.

“You mean Nazis or game bots? Doesn’t that suggest some kind of organization or evil intent or something? They’re more like mangy koala bears. They need to be taken in and loved by you. They need to be persuaded to be civil. They’re not leaders, Bran, they’re followers, they just need to be pointed to your tail.”

“Christopher, please.”

“Isn’t that why we have all these soldiers? To keep the city safe?”

“You saw her speech, right?” The mayor dropped the controller and held his fist in the air, counting off on his fingers, trying and failing to keep the condescension out of his voice. “Number one, she’s cute. Number two, she looked insanely competent. Her voice did not waver. She amassed an army and put them in uniforms. They looked rumpled and retarded, but there were a lot of them and they were serious. Three”—he raised his middle finger—“she’s a fucking folk hero. That’s how she did it. That’s the only way. I don’t know what she’s paying that army, but you can bet that the appeal of serving a Ms. Guevara is a hell of a recruitment tool. Four, the entire fucking city would riot if we took her out. Think about it. It’s a rioting mood out there, it’s like everybody’s new favorite hobby, and she’s everybody’s new favorite person. And number five?”

The mayor held his pinky in the air. The huffing German soldier and Christopher waited and watched until Christopher could see there was no number five, and knew this would be one more irritant for the mayor, one more bit of imprecision lining up in protest against his obsessive-compulsive tendencies, and so he took hold of that pinky in the air with his own fist and kissed the end of it.

“Shoot some monsters, Bran,” Christopher said. “We’ll tackle it in the morning. Maybe she’ll have lost control by then.”

“Nazis,” the mayor said.

“Nazis.” Christopher patted the mayor’s shoulder and left him to his violence.

The mayor stayed still in the empty room. The generator turned off, the batteries having filled, the bedroom door closed. The night was quiet outside, and there was an ache of fear and anger that lined his insides with the weight of lead. He kept his fist up in the air, his pinky upraised, unable to let it down until a number five came to him.

Out the window where there’d once been a sparkling night view, the city stretched dark and dull. In the distance he could see the yellow twinkle of a fire of some kind, a house fire or a car, or even a whole block. He was comforted to see the lights of an emergency vehicle, making its slow way through the unlit chaos. That’s me, he thought, right there. Putting out fires.

“Number five,” he whispered finally, shaking his pinky out toward the view, “she’ll fail, because people revile and fear a foreign body. What she has built is more akin to a cult. Those around her will fear its spread like a cancer and the populace will focus on cutting her out.” But he wasn’t sure this was true. A cult, a trend, a fad—any radical change had its shot at becoming the new norm, shedding the skin of the old as it went.

He picked up the controller and reset his game and savored the thought that in the world he was about to enter he was unequivocally not the bad guy. He was an Allied soldier fighting the Nazis. His cause was just.