Going Shogun (8 page)

“The only thing I can remember is
the doorknob, the stereo dial, and then you with the keyboard.”

The Minotaur says, “Way more than
enough, even if it’s incidental contact.  It’s highly doubtful they’ll leave
anything alone if they find it.  At least that’s the way we used to do it.” 
For about a sphincter-clinch of a second, I think I see something resembling
wistfulness in his eyes, but it’s gone, just like that, as he returns to the
screens.  “Plus, if they really thought it was you guys, they’d triangulate
your cell phone signal and have you in custody in about ten minutes.  All three
of you should seriously consider dumping them in a drainage ditch a few miles
from here.”

“I left mine at home,” I say.

“That just means they’ll find you
there at some point if they’re looking, but it buys you some extra time.” 
That’s not comforting, at all.  Nothing I can do about it now though.

Forklift says, “Mine’s been
chop-hopped with a no-lo.  Phone’s totally bacon-flavored.”

I take this to mean he’s hacked his
phone, or paid a few bucks to have a no-location virus uploaded.  It’s not out
of the ordinary.  I’ve heard a lot of people do it.  And besides, Forklift is into
all that anti-Board Supremacy rebellion.

The Minotaur gives him a questioning
look.   

Bingo unzips one of the thousands of
pockets on her pants leg and pulls her purple phone out.  Pops the back off,
removes the battery, hands it to The Minotaur and says, “No reason for them to
be looking for me, but just in case.”

He takes it from her.  “You never
know,” he says.  “I’ll keep an eye out on the incoming and outgoing to see
where they are.  Get home.  Hide.  Hole up.  Wait it out.  Only come back if
you haven’t been clipped in the next 24 hours.  Agreed?  I like you, but I’m
not risking thirty years at P15 for three grand.”

“Agreed,” I say as I stand to leave,
with Bingo right behind me. 

“There’s another pawn move that
concerns me though.”

Forklift says, “Leak the faucet,
maze-dweller.”

The Minotaur raises an eyebrow,
dismisses the mythology reference, and proceeds.  “Here’s what I don’t get.  LX
was almost as much of a quasi-Off Paper hermit as I am.  Who would’ve been at
his apartment at this hour and alerted the BAs?”

Good question, and none of us have
the answer.

Chapter
5

We walk out of The Minotaur’s place
and I’m a little confused and a whole lot scared.  Before, this was some
childish game of swords we were playing with Fate, except the edges were so
dull they’d have a hard time cutting Wishful Thinking’s Pistachio Fudge
Margarine into those dainty squares.  What it boils down to now is, two guys,
trying to take the easy way up because they were lazy or simply didn’t have
hope of achieving something better through hard work and dedication, are
nostril-deep in a vat of kids-at-the-pool.  That giant-sized possibility of
taking a bobsled ride into Sustained P is now more real than the daydream reality
we’ve created for ourselves. 

Dream Chasers, the restaurant.  As
if.

Forklift says, “Gotta Graham-Bell a
compadre
. 
60 seconds, tops.” 

“Forklift, damn it!  Come on,” I
say, but he’s already on the move.  “You heard what The Minotaur said about them
tracking those things.”  Even if he’s hacked it, it’s not something I’m willing
to be at ease with.

He beep-beep doodly-beeps his cell
phone, throws up a wait-a-minute finger, and agitates around the corner of the
building and out of sight.

Frustrated, I whisper-yell after
him, “Hurry up!  And don’t get dead back there.” 

One, we don’t want any more
opportunities for the BAs to track us and two, we don’t want to be standing out
in the open on Birdneck for too long.  That’s how you wind up on the 6 o’clock
news with Paul “Pageboy” James. 

It’s the haircut.  The thing is
mesmerizing.

I turn to Bingo, who looks numb from
the cold or the craziness of the situation, and she isn’t shaking anymore.  I
feel a heavy burden of regret that she’s involved.  After all, Forklift did say
that this was too Bigfoot for her to skinny dip in it.  But, she’s the one who
wants to invent fire in a cave and step on dinosaur road apples while gnawing
on a seared antelope carcass, so losing more of her R-status shouldn’t be a big
deal. 

It doesn’t change the fact that I
feel the need to keep her warm.  I step over, wrap myself around her.  She
sinks into me.  Buries her face in the pit of my arm.

“I always liked the smell of your
deodorant,” she says.  “Reminds me of my dad in the mornings.  You know...before.”

I don’t even think to ask “
Before
what?”
because I meander right into my own memory.

I smile.  Way back when, she’d told
me something similar after we made out at a party.  Some R11-3 that used to
work at Wishful Thinking was house-sitting for his R10 uncle and invited the
whole crew over for a night of Whiz Sticks and Pop Roxy in the hot tub.  That
was the night Bingo put her hand on my crotch and then threw up on my shoulder. 
In that order.  Nothing can bring you back from that.  Not psychedelics, not a
hot girl with her shirt off, not even the desire to get laid by someone for the
first time in three years.  I don’t know how parents of newborns and the
Surrogate Matrons that take care of the Non-Aborts down at the Second Chance Shelter
do it. 

I’m about to tell Bingo that I like
the way she smells too when a different scent, something pungent, something
rotten, knocks me out of my daydream.  My instincts go animal and my immediate
response is
danger
. 

Bingo picks up on it at the exact
same time and we both turn our heads down the street.  A block away, a pack of
six dirty, disheveled, and diseased highboys are marching toward us. 

It’s The Outsiders meets The Walking
Dead. 

As I’m standing there cursing all
the useless classic movie knowledge that’s stuck in my head, wishing it would
actually come in useful one of these days, Bingo takes a step back toward
Machine
and tries to pull me with her.  I hold ground for a second, wary of sudden
moves, thinking,
Don’t show fear
.

My eyes aren’t the best at night,
but when I strain to focus with the help of a single streetlight, I can see
them holding baseball bats and iron bars, another one with what seems to be a
roll of barbed wire.  Typical weapons of the drug-rich and responsibility-poor. 

Shoppers of Gangs Unlimited. 
Patrons of Thugs ‘n’ Things.  Discount card-carrying members of Hoodlum-Mart. 

Thank the Triumvirate upstairs that
every gun was supposedly rounded up over the past twenty years and disposed of
due to Rule 381.23 and little Henry Thomas.

Except for Board Agents.  As a means
to Preserve Control, they’re the only individuals allowed to have guns, the
only ones that even have access to them. 

“To preserve life and the integrity
of the human race,” The Board says.

I haven’t seen one up close since my
dad handed his .22 pistol over to the Collection Committee, back when I was a
kid.

However thankful I am that we won’t
be bullet bait, I can’t help but gasp at what’s coming our way, and when I try
to step backward toward the car, I trip over my own baggy pants and yelp on the
way down. 

Fear shown.

They break into a run.  Their
collective war cry could shatter glass.

I don’t have to yell for Forklift
because Bingo does it for me. 

Even though he was halfway proven wrong
years ago by theoretical physicist John Wenger, Einstein still has a little
hold on the theory of relativity.  Time travel isn’t possible (yet) but we must
be approaching the speed of light at that very moment because time slows to a goddamn
crawl as I struggle to my feet and watch the highboys careen toward us in a
flipbook-style blur of pumping arms and piston legs.  If they were an engine,
we could harness the power they’re generating to light up half of Urine Town.

Bingo is screaming, screaming, screaming
for Forklift and yanking, yanking, yanking on
Machine
’s passenger handle
so hard I’m afraid she’s going to rip the door off its hinges.  I’m in a
half-crouch position, arms out, legs bent at the knees, scuttling from one spot
to the next, desperately looking for anything to use as a weapon. 

I’m thinking,
Where, where,
something, anything, grab, no, SHIT, where, where, grab, NO DAMN IT, hurry,
hurry, hurry.  Heartbeat.  Heartbeat. Is that my heartbeat?  That’s loud.  Can
I use that? What is it?  NO, hurry, hurry.  A stick, no, no, no.  Not strong
enough.  Look.  Something.  Gotta be something here.  Where is Forklift?  Wait,
wow, is that a nickel?  I haven’t seen one of those in fifteen years either.

CONCENTRATE.  Weapon, weapon,
weapon.  There!

Salvation comes from a beer bottle
so old that I can only make out –
rona
on the side.  I figure it’s my
only hope in taking advantage of the last two minutes Bingo and I have here on
Earth.  I smash the end on the concrete to make some jagged edges, stand up, run
over to protect her where she’s now a sobbing mess on the sidewalk, and then I
get ready to go shogun on the first Roxyhead that comes the closest.  It might
be the last act of a chivalrous idiot, but I’ll go down trying to protect the
woman I...really care about.

Chapter
6

Every breath I take puffs out of me
in a fine mist, like the fear inside me is escaping in miniature clouds.  Only
I wish that were true.  I wish the fear was leaving, but it keeps regenerating
itself, over and over and builds and builds inside me with each repetition of
nature’s eternal, subconscious attempt to keep us alive.  I’m wondering where
Forklift is, why he isn’t here yet, why he hasn’t come running, where he is at this
unbelievably prolonged moment to open the car door and get us out of this
wasteland that would make T. S. Eliot proud.  It dawns on me that it’s April,
which is apparently the cruelest month. 

I’m going to die in April.  Forklift
isn’t going to make it in time.  April...  April.

Weird what pops into your mind when
you know you’re about to die.  April was my first girlfriend, during
Pre-Level.  She slept on the mat beside mine when we had lights out for
naptime.  My parents did it and they were married, so at the time I thought we
were too. 
Married
.  It was such a simple concept at that age.  You
sleep beside each other, you’re married.  You eat at the same table with each
other at least once a day, you’re married. 

You fight over the red Crayon,
you’re married.

April
. 

She had brown hair.

I turn to Bingo.  She has jet-black,
purple-highlighted hair.  She’s also got her eyes closed.  No, not just closed,
they’re cemented shut, blocking out the moment, holding in the tears that
should be falling.  Her lips are moving and for a moment I think she’s so scared
she’s gone C-status on me right here, talking to herself, huddled up against
the door of a neon-green hunk of meaningless, meaningless metal.  It has parts,
thousands of parts.  Plastic ones, metal ones, cloth ones.  You push on a piece
of hard rubber, which feeds $25-per-gallon gas into a combustion engine and it
moves you from one place to the next.  Lifeless.  Pointless.

Unfeeling.

It’s an object.  We put so much
emphasis on objects. 

What happened to flying cars?  Where
are they?

Hell, what happened to walking?

This car, this
Machine
,
it’s
a soulless object, unlike God’s perfect purple-haired creature huddled against
it. 

God
.

Then I realize Bingo is praying.  I
can barely make out the words to The Board’s Prayer, which was instituted
immediately after Church and State were desegregated decades ago.

“To preserve the sanctity of faith
and justice,” The Board says.

I should probably be doing the same
but there’s no time.  I feel like I’ve been here for hours, talking to myself,
thinking about poetry and pigtails from past lives, but as I turn back to the
screaming horde, they haven’t reached the edge of The Minotaur’s building yet.

So far, so close.

The moment you give up is a heavy
one.  Resignation hovers over you, waiting for permission, and then it settles,
wrapping itself around you like a pitch-black blanket, like a thousand-pound shroud
made of Wishful Thinking’s Blackberry Onion Remoulade.

I take a deep breath, readying
myself with grit and gristle.

In the next instant, rescue materializes
in the form of a bucktoothed waiter.

I don’t know where he comes from,
but out of the corner of my eye I see Forklift, literally flying parallel to
the ground headfirst, arms outstretched like that guy from the comics with the
blue body suit and red cape, as he hurls himself into the pack.  He’s like one
of those flower power eco-bombs that some eco-Nazis blew up over Detroit awhile
back and turned the Motor City into the Green City.