Going Shogun (9 page)

They scream and trip and fall and
stumble over each other and turn into a wailing, writhing mass of bodies trying
regain their footing, trying to figure out what happened, what went wrong. 

All but one. 

Forklift left the ten-pin standing. 
Or running, rather, and he’s coming straight at us.  I take one quick glance at
Bingo.  She’s got a hint of hope on her face.  Empowered by Forklift’s heroics
and my desire to protect her, I power-launch myself out of the gate toward
Ten-Pin. 

I’m only two steps closer to him
when I hear a soft
zip
through the air and his left temple turns into Krakatoa
and releases a foggy red eruption.  He falls face-first, inert, as his head
hammers Death into the concrete.

What was that?  Where did it come
from?

I look to my right, then up at The
Minotaur’s window.  He’s leaning out, holding something.

A slingshot, probably bought on RollerNinja,
with what has to be exploding pellets. 

He lets another shot of ammo fly and
shouts, “Go!”

I pull Bingo up and ask if she’s
okay.  She says she’s fine, then sees the icky brain goo of the Roxyhead a few
feet away and immediately begins to dry-heave.

Over in the mass of bodies, Forklift
effortlessly throws some surprisingly accurate elbows and kicks, taking out a
couple of highboys in the process, then hops up to his feet like he just
finished tying his shoes and is ready to head out for a light jog through the
neighborhood.  He trots over to us, pops off a couple of shadowboxing jabs and
an uppercut. 

The Minotaur shouts, “Go!” again,
more insistent this time, and another Roxyhead drops to the ground due to his
accurate aim.

I say, “You okay, Fork?”

“Trippin’ with an itsy-bitsy blue
polka-dot bruise-kini but I’m go for space, Brickness.  See me go rocketman on
those arm-pokers?”

“Yeah, you were sugar.  Now open the
damn doors.”

Another thug takes a round from The
Minotaur right in the center of his chest and his stark white t-shirt turns
into a juicy red Rorschach blot.  The others wise up and begin to back off.

Bingo comes to life and she’s
pissed
. 
She grinds out, “Where were you?” and throws a meandering left hook that misses
his namesake teeth by millimeter.

“Easy peasy bacon greasy,
Bingonator.  I made it back, didn’t I?”

She starts to throw another scared,
angry, frustrated, distraught punch at him, but I catch her arm.  “Stop,” I
say, “We don’t have time for this.  Forklift.  We.  Go.  Now.  Simple enough
for you?”

I take one last look at The Minotaur
and shout up at him, “Tomorrow night?” even though I’m not positive I’ll
want
to make another trip back into Urine Town after the last few minutes.

He gives a thumbs-up and retreats
back inside his window like a moray eel slithering back into his cave.

Chapter
7

We’re inside of
Machine
now,
doing a flyby on Urine Town’s dregs so fast that I swear the tires aren’t even
touching the ground.  We’re a hovercraft gliding across the marshes of city
slums.  We’re a rock skipping across the top of a dilapidated lake.  We are
wind.

Forklift manipulates the steering
wheel like it’s an extension of himself; body, mind, and car are one single,
efficient unit.  We ease around 90° corners like they’re not even there,
passing nighthoneys in their skintight mini-skirts that are so short, I can see
what they had for breakfast.  They wave at us, catcall at us, flip us the
bird. 
Machine
must be a sight to them since most of the urchins in Urine
Town drive rusty, beat-up Chevrofords that run on electricity and can barely
make it down the block at 25mph. 

Electric cars.  What a mistake that
was.

They’re still around, barely, and
subsist on life support. 

At first, it was one of the few logical
things The Board had ever instituted.  “To preserve our dear Mother Earth,”
they said. 

That was a long time ago. 

The major oil and gas companies
rebelled by using their vast, full football stadium piles of cash to turn every
company affiliated with the electric car industry into kowtowing fools that
bent over and took the pipeline like it was greased with Wishful Thinking’s
Chili Chestnut Doughnut Glaze.  When those guys were on their payroll and
sufficiently sequestered, they went after local Under Board members and kept
right on working their way up the chain until they reached the big guys.  They
were all so in bed together that corruption birthed corruption birthed
corruption.  It was like putting a gaggle of highboys and nighthoneys in a locked
room with nothing but a crate of Sex Booster Pro and no Penis Protectors.

The power lies in the money.  Always
has, always will. 

Who has it, and who has more of it. 

That whole thing, the waiting, the
payoffs, the corruption, it didn’t matter to the Oil Magnates.  They knew that
being patient for five years and using billions of dollars on bribes would be
worth their ROI once the industry came back around.  By then, everyone was
worked into a corner.  The Magnates had The Board by their gray-haired, saggy,
empty balls, and the rest of us didn’t have a choice when gas went from $10 a
gallon to where it sits now.  We’re taught in Life School that the exact same
thing happened in the early 2000s, but evidently nobody learned their lesson
because history, in fact, does repeat itself.

I look over to Forklift, and his
face is as calm and serene as a mirror pool.  A trickle of blood leaks out of
his right ear and I can only imagine some errant bone from a highboy popped him
a good one as he was flying
kamikaze
through their
blitzkrieg
.

I should be yelling at him.  I
should be screaming at him for leaving us hanging while he went off to speed
dial a weasel-tweaker.  Whatever he was doing, whichever girly he was calling,
he should be bowing at our feet, asking a thousand pardons.  Instead, I let it
go.  I don’t know whether it’s the pants-shitting madness of the previous
moment or the fact that I’m happy to be alive, but I can’t handle any more
intensity.  He’s not getting out of it completely, trust me, but I decide to
put it up on the mental shelf, save it for later. 

I reach over and turn down the
psychotic wailing of the death-country band A Tale of Two Kitties.  When my
eardrums stop flapping like a dog’s jowls during a windy car ride, I turn to
Forklift and say, “Thank you,” sincerely, and Bingo says the same as well.

“Those zombonis were ready to
homerun your brainhouses, doodles.  Couldn’t hide-and-seek on you.”

“Regardless, you’re forgiven of all
your debts. 
And
sins.” 

How could he not be?  All those times
I’d taken a punch for him, all those times I bailed him out of the Overnight
Redemption Cells when he’d had too much to drink, all those times I got up at
6AM to pick him up from some sheila’s crib when he was going ghost on her.  He
was never in any true danger of dying when I rescued his scrawny ass.  Not like
we were back there.  My sacrifices were minimal comparatively.  He
saved
us, man.  Completely and truly, it was unconditional.  The way he threw himself
at them was the stuff of superheroes and legends.  I’ll never come right out
and tell him that, because if his head gets filled with any more hot air, he’ll
float away like a BridgeYear blimp.

“
Gracias
,” he says.  No big
deal.  Another day in the life, like he would’ve gotten more stressed about
picking out the right pair of socks.  But something is there, something in his
tone.  It’s diminutive, miniscule, tiny, like the faint flash of color from one
of those nearly extinct lightning bugs at the Museum of Yesterday. 

Is it guilt?  I can’t tell.

Bingo licks a thumb, reaches over,
and tries to mom-wash the blood off the side of his head, her earlier rage
forgotten.  Just like a mother.  One minute they’re throwing a shoe at you, the
next, they’re cutting the crust off a PB&J because you remembered to ask
nicely.  It’s a tender moment between them.

Too tender, obviously, for
Forklift.  He pushes her hand away playfully and says, “Ugh, nasty-nast.  Save
your mouth-juice for Brick.”

We all laugh, even though the weight
of what he said hovers in the air like a floating elephant we should be
ignoring. 

Which is exactly what Bingo and I
both do.  There is no elephant in the room.

Possibly.

Back to the car, the job, the heist,
this monstrous moment of maladies.  I know I should be asking Forklift to take me
home where I can hide under my blankie and think about what in the eternal hell
I’m doing.  Yet if I turn back now, if I give myself time to weigh everything,
I’ll run.  I’ll give in.  I’ll go back to The Big Suck of wondering whether or
not I’ll be able to pay the electric bill, whether or not I’ll be able to feed
myself something other than leftover Honey Lamb Cakes from Wishful Thinking’s
bakery, whether or not I’ll ever get out of this eternal rut of The Routine. 
Is the potential for escape worth the possibility of jail time?

Short answer:  ...sure.  I think.

I wonder where Bingo’s head is, so I
tap her on the shoulder and ask.

“Oh, I’m in,” she says.  “You don’t
just walk away from watching a guy’s brains fall out of his skull to putting on
a new color of toenail polish.  You definitely aren’t getting rid of me now.”

Thought so, but to speak truthfully,
39% of me was wish-upon-a-star hoping she’d realize how crazy this mess has
gotten, bow out, and go home to her white-walled, sparsely furnished apartment
and call it a night.  I forget sometimes how hardheaded she can be.  It’s cute
in a feisty puppy sort of way.

We sit in silence, each of us lost
in the peaks and troughs of our brainwaves.   As we flow through the night,
riding along with Forklift’s masterfully fluid driving, we finally breach the
edges of Urine Town and start to work our way through neighborhoods that rise
in level with each passing set of city blocks.  It reminds me of swimming
through the ring of garbage in Las Vegas Harbor as it opens into a slightly
cleaner ocean. 

I can tell where we are based on the
types of stores and shops and gas stations that swirl past in a mish-mash
spectrum of double-rainbow colored light.  The R12 blocks have businesses with
generic names like
JOE’S GAS
and
Mike’s Pawn
.  They’ve got bars
over their windows and floodlights that burn blue, floating circles into your
retinas.  Sometimes it prevents the nasties from breaking in, sometimes it
doesn’t. 

We go osmosis into the R11 ‘hoods
and the door-to-door, wall-to-wall exuberance of capisocialism begins to scream
at us from all sides with perky neon and artistically decorative overhangs.  We
tear past a Coffeestars the size of a big box grocery store and the wafting
smell of pseudo-Arabica beans saturates the car.  I know Forklift despises that
place and I can feel the g-forces of
Machine
get bumped up by a couple
miles-per-hour.

I mention that he may want to lift
the anvil off the go-zoom to avoid any undue attention from a bored security
cruiser.  Doing so reminds me of the pot-stirring moment back in The Minotaur’s
pad.

“Holy shit,” I say.  “I forgot about
the Board Agents getting dispatched to LX’s place.”

Forklift slows down a tick, looks
over to me and says, “Memory bank computational, Brick Bro.  It’s current in
the visual.”

“So now what do we do?” I ask.  I
grab Bingo around her waist, shifting her a little so her tailbone stops
digging into my thigh.  She smiles at me when I leave my hand on her hip.  And
at a time like this, with everything going on, I feel
it
stir a bit. 

I think,
Fireball, Fireball,
Fireball
.  And it’s just enough to soothe the savage beast.

For now.

Forklift takes a break from All That
Is Forklift for a miniature moment and conveys his thoughts in a deciphered
manner.  “The Minotaur said we should lay low for the rest of the night.  Go
groundhog until we see if the BAs show up, yeah?  I’m not about to do that
though.  Too much going on up in the ol’ bean for me to sleep.”

“Agreed.”

“So, the way I see it, if we’re
going to stay a step ahead of the All Seeing Eye, we need to find LX and figure
out what went down in his apartment.  He was in there when all this happened. 
I’m sure of it.  Just in case, we need an alibi, and he knows what happened,
man.  He knows.”  Forklift pauses to light up a cigarette, both hands off the
wheel.  I notice he’s not even steering with his knee, so I reach over and
readjust our course about two seconds before we take the mirror off this green
and white R11-2 taxi.  Bingo whimpers, but Forklift remains as cool as a spritz
of Wishful Thinking’s Peppermint Fish Oil salad dressing.

“Where do you think he might be?” I
ask.

Bingo says, “Didn’t you mention
something about a rabbit hole?”

I go, “His message said, ‘down the
rabbit hole,’ and that was it.”