Sherwood Nation (39 page)

Zach felt a hollow fear bang around his insides and knew it was time for distribution. Every morning contained a growing thirst and an expectation of that fear. He missed Sherwood. He had been at his hou
se too short of a time and had no savings. With the two of them, he and his patient, to look after now, he could not afford any mistakes.

When the time came and his tongue felt coated in ash he tucked a knife—a small but easily opened blade—into his pocket and set off with his unit gallon. He watched his neighbors walk toward the same destination like wolves toward a kill, and he stayed close in with them, familiars by sight. Most of them were in groups, and he knew that those who walked alone were not to be trusted. In times like these, people who have the disposition band together and watch each other’s backs.

The day was burdensomely hot and the heat pressed on him, made each footfall toward his destination feel like a herculean extra effort. There was no cloud in the sky, just a mammoth bowl of blue sky that crushed down on them. As the temperature had increased over the last week, his skin had dried up, so that the subtlest of facial expressions caused his lips to crack and bleed.

Distribution was at Oregon Park, a few blocks from his place. The truck was already there, white and bulbous, like an egg waiting to be cracked, darkened by dust and the grease of human hands that reached up to touch its cool belly. He stood in a line that wound its way along the dusty park, its once great trees all cut down in the winter previous. There were patterns rutted deep into the ground for this daily ritual they all performed. The standing in line, the truck parked in the same spot, the National Guardsmen roving their eyes back and forth across the lot of them.

After a long wait Zach made it to the front. There were some moments of confusion as the guard checked his identification with its water code and noticed that he’d had his card registered in Sherwood recently. Zach responded quietly that he’d moved out of Sherwood, as he’d explained many times already, and he could feel those behind him lean in to listen. When he was cleared he hooked the nozzle into the top socket of his unit gallon and heard the relieving sound of it being filled. But as it came to the top the nozzle sputtered and the tone changed. Behind him someone yelled and he quickly disconnected his gallon. The truck was out of water and there were at least a hundred more in line behind him. The murmur of the news made it quickly up and down the line, and the ragged-looking man directly behind him called out in protest.

“That’s enough,” the Guardsman said and held his hand up to calm the crowd behind him.

Zach gripped his bottle to him and eased away from the line as the crowd began to go amorphous, transforming from order to mob. “There’ll be another truck,” the Guardsman yelled out.

“I stood here an hour! An hour!” the man who had been behind him said.

“It will come,” the guardsman said.

“Hey, Sherwooder!” he yelled as Zach retreated. He followed after Zach and then reached in for a hold on Zach’s bottle and for a moment they wrestled it like a football on astroturf, pulling and scratching at each other. The man’s furry, tangled mat of hair was sticky from grime. They fell together and struggled for the prize on the ground and then Zach pulled away enough to get a foot up and kick him. The blow landed in his face and there was a sickening pop. Zach rolled backward and then to his feet and fought a gag reflex. He snatched the bottle from the man’s clutches. “Sorry!” he yelled, catching a last glimpse of him on the ground, his head reared up, blood and dust mingled into his mustache. “Sorry!” Zach turned and ran.

A warning gun shot rang out and Zach turned to see the National Guard jeeps circling in close. The crowd huddled angrily. They were promised another water truck would arrive sooner rather than later. Zach hurried his bottle out of the park toward home. He needed to meet someone. To pair up. Perhaps his patient. Walking the streets alone with a bottle was a risk he didn’t want to take often.

Back at the three-story building, he went to the roof and looked out at the city. Soon the people would be getting ready to settle into darkness, gathering ration candles, if they had them, the coming power outage about to dim the landscape.

He opened his unit gallon and drank three units off before he could stop himself, and when he did, he felt as though he’d only wetted his lips, mere drops in the dry well of him. He found some empty canning jars, retrieved his permanent marker and sat in front of his unit gallon and concentrated on distributing a portion from each to a jar before he would allow himself another drink. Sherwood habit. He labeled the jars with their intended purpose.

Jamal saw a young boy of nine or ten at the end of the street. He walked with a heavily practiced gait, swinging his brown arms aggressively and with flair. He wore a black sweatshirt and white sweatpants, negating entirely, in Jamal’s min
d, the effect of cool the boy sought. But what did he know? He was already too old for street fashion. The boy was thin and looked like he needed a bath, three square meals a day, and the care of an attentive mother to set him back on some forward-facing track. None of which Jamal felt he’d turn down himself.

The boy crossed the street toward them and his swagger faltered once as he made eye contact with them, and then intensified as he got close.

“Y’all be looking for yo Rain-Joes?”

“You’ve seen them?”

“Check da house.” The boy pointed to the same house where the note claimed Charles was in charge.

“Oh? Hey wait—” Jamal said, but the boy turned to walk away. Jamal called after him, “Who is Charles?” and he thought he saw a noticeable jerk in the boy’s walk, as if a marionette string had been yanked violently, throwing one leg in the wrong direction. The boy quickly regained his stride and was gone.

“Somebody sent him,” Rick said.

“We’re being watched,” Carl said.

“Yep,” Rick said.

“It’s a trap,” Carl said.

“Yep,” Rick said.

Jamal fought the desire to cut and run, fifteen-year-old memories running ghost-like over his anxieties.

“My spidey sense is tingling,” Rick said.

“Don’t say spidey sense,” Carl said, “just don’t say it.”

“What? Why not?”

“There’s no such word as spidey.”

“It’s from—”

“I know what the fuck it’s from,” Carl said. “But listen to it. There’s ‘spider’ and ‘spidery,’ there’s no ‘spidey.’”

Rick deepened his voice and gave it an English accent, “My spidery senses are causing my fancies to tingle.”

“Where is everybody?” Jamal said.

They locked their bikes to a stop sign and kept watch on the house at the end of the street.

A cloud passed over the sun and Jamal stared into the sky, seeing great clouds there like the front line of an infantry passing by. They would bring no rain, he knew, only dust.

“Does anyone have a plan?” Jamal asked hopefully, feeling that the proper thing to say was:
I have a plan
, seeing as how he was in charge, and realizing that he was relinquishing some morsel of authority simply by asking the question.

“Check out the house,” said Rick. He was digging in a flesh-colored fanny pack—which Jamal noticed for the first time was actually a pack and not part of the man’s flesh. He came up with an extra clip, which he put in his back pocket.

They were so not a real army, Jamal thought, not the Going Street Brigade, and especially not the measly three of them. He wished he’d brought another fifty soldiers with him. He looked up the street for a Ranger to signal with, but the streets were dead empty in all directions.

“You think they’re still alive?” Carl said.

“I’m not thinking anything,” Rick said.

“We can hope,” Jamal said. But he couldn’t imagine why anyone would go taking hostages. Life was cheap in the drought. Who would waste the water to keep a hostage alive?

“This is going to creep me right out if we don’t start doing something right now,” Rick said.

They fanned out and walked toward the house at the end of the street. On the right at the end of the block was what appeared to be a micro junkyard, with high fences and several dozen old junkers. There used to be big, angry dogs there, Jamal remembered, who would throw themselves against the fence to get at him as he walked by.

Jamal signaled for Rick to go up the stairs of the house and knock while he covered him. The house had a tall porch with broad steps. It was built in the twenties, before the shop behind it had blocked off its backyard with a big concrete wall.

Next to the door was a large, intact window that led to the living room, covered by a full curtain.

Carl eased around the right side of the porch and managed to find a vantage where he could keep an eye on Rick.

As Rick turned the doorknob, Jamal watched Rick’s body jerk with gunshot impacts and then fall against the door, which swung wide with the pressure. Jamal ducked and looked around wildly—the shots were coming from elsewhere, though he could see no gunmen. There was nowhere to run, except into the house. Jamal leapt up the side of the porch, nearly colliding with Carl, and felt one leg twitch away from him, an icy coolness there that began to yield pain. And then he was inside, dragging Rick’s body deeper into the house.

After Jamal had been gone for ten hours, Gregor paced around the map room, blisters of anger and worry erupting from h
im in sharp bursts.

Maid Marian sat on the big orange knit couch and observed how quickly the system had fallen apart without Zach. She was angry at him for not training others well enough. He’d become irreplaceable. And yet she had spent time with that convoluted brain, knew the feeling of irritated bafflement that came over her when he tried to explain how the system he’d created worked. He’d trained a horse only he could ride. When Zach was gone there was nothing left but to shoot the horse.

“Tell me again where he is?” Gregor said, pointing at the piles of notes with his pipe.

She’d not seen Gregor like this before. He went to his knees and began rummaging through a box, making an utter mess of the notes, reading them at random and then throwing them aside. He’d lost a son and a wife already, she remembered. “Zach is not coming back,” she said quietly.

“Yes, but
why
? Where is he?”

She didn’t want to get into this with anyone, especially not her general. Dictators don’t have spouses. Dictators have low-level, disposable concubines. It should be easy, like a toddler’s passing interest in a toy. You find a Ranger. You pick him up and then you set him down when you’re finished. Were these different times Zach and she might be together, but she couldn’t worry about the feelings of anyone else, especially not her chief of intelligence. And yet, she did, and it was her complex, conflicting emotions that’d finally been too much for him.

“Zach has gone home to the Southeast,” she said.

“We need him here,” Gregor said, he held up a crumpled wad in each hand. “He’s left a shithole.”

Renee shrugged dismissively. She wanted this topic to end. She picked up the handful of notes she’d been reading through and began filtering through them; her eyes had trouble with the words, her mind unfocused.

“I’ll go get him,” Gregor said. “He can’t abandon post.”

“How?”

With irritation Gregor said: “We’ll slip through the border and bring him back.”

Renee watched her general pace back and forth in front of her. She realized it had been a mistake to allow him to appoint his own kin as captain of the Going Street Brigade. The same kind of mistake as appointing your boyfriend to be information officer.

She thought about kidnapping Zach. Could they hold him here as a worker? She wasn’t sure. She told herself she needed to make the decision for the nation. If fetching Zach was something that could right her general and keep security from collapsing, then it was necessary.

“He’s somewhere in Woodlawn,” Gregor said, speaking of Jamal. “This makes six disappeared in forty-eight hours. We need a force to go raze the neighborhood.”

“No,” she said. She got up and began to pace on the other side of the table, their pacing like two pendulums working in opposite synchronization.

There were two Rangers under the charge of Gregor waiting for his orders. Leroy hovered close and tried to reassemble the various messes Gregor made while Bea read notes from the pile. Renee could see Bea work studiously at the notes, ashamed for being the last to see both Jamal and Zach.

“There’s nothing from Woodlawn here,” Bea said. “Only today’s notes. Last week is gone. Jamal must have taken them.”

Gregor walked to the Woodlawn neighborhood map section and tapped on it with the end of his unlit pipe. To her he looked stooped and suddenly aged. Renee waved one of Gregor’s Rangers over. “You know Morse code, right? I need you to go to the Vernon tank, that old water tower on Twentieth and Prescott. You know it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Take a friend and this.” Renee handed over the green laser pointer she fingered in her pocket.

“I have one of my own, sir, if you’d prefer. I’m a semaphorist.”

“Of course you are, fucking Zach,” she said. “Well, that’s what I want you to do. Stand on the south side of the tower and aim high enough on the tank with your pointer. He used to watch that tower for messages in the early evenings from the Southeast.”

“What should I say, sir?”

“To get his ass back up here, right now,” Gregor said.

Renee shrugged. “Please. Tell him Jamal is missing and . . . you probably won’t even get him, he’s not going to be out there anymore. You know what? I’ll go, you come with me.”

Bea stood up quickly.

“Goddamnit!” Gregor said. “I don’t know what to do with this crap.” He threw down the pile of notes he’d been shuffling without reading. He felt he was reliving a nightmare from his past, when he’d been willful and arrogant and at war with Barstow. Except then he knew who his enemy was.

“Gregor,” Renee said and signaled for him to leave the room with her. In the hallway they whispered. “What don’t I know about this,” she said.

Gregor briefed her on his Woodlawn history. He spoke in a hoarse whisper, an aura of defeat about him.

“But we’re not drug dealers,” Renee said, “we’re the government of Sherwood. This is not Zach’s fault. It’s not Jamal’s or Bea’s fault. This is a situation. We handle situations. Get with Leroy, pull a month’s worth of notes, read them all. If a note is odd, ask Leroy if he knows the address. Do your work, remember who you are. I’ll work on Zach.” She pressed her hand into his chest and said, “We can totally do this. We’re not going to fall apart.”

Gregor straightened. “Yes, sir,” he said.

They held each other’s gaze and she felt like she was staring into a mine the depth of which was unknown. “We’re OK?” she asked.

“We’re OK,” he said.

She could not read him, but his demeanor seemed free of resentment. It was the first time she’d ever seen him lose focus and she couldn’t help but want to apologize for giving him—a generation older and a leader for decades—a lecture.