Sherwood Nation (57 page)

At the Hawthorne bridge they pointed themselves toward the Portland skyline across the river and paused again.

“This is a simple plan,” he said, “it’s a desperado’s plan. What you must do to clear your mind, do so now. There will be battle.” It’s a simple speech, too, Gregor thought, wishing he had some charm to give them or a tea ceremony to perform. He looked each of them in the eyes and felt grateful they’d followed him this far. He hoped it was not for nothing.

He waved his hand forward and drove and they followed over the bridge.

On the other side they went the three blocks to city hall, driving hard. Two guards were coming out of the building and Gregor skipped the curb and accelerated into them. He crushed one, and winged the other, whom he shot when the guard pulled his gun.

“Strip their weapons,” he yelled, and then he backed up and accelerated his jeep through the front glass doors of city hall.

There were six more guards at the security gate inside the doors and Gregor crouched down in the jeep as gunfire peeled about him from all directions. He heard the clatter of bicycles dropping and Rangers pouring in behind him and then the gunfire was over. He lifted his head to see the bodies of the guards being relieved of their guns. Three Rangers were on the floor.

He wrangled with the door of the crashed jeep until he realized it would not pry open. He crawled over the top with the help of the Rangers, calling out in pain when his leg bumped.

Two of his Rangers on the floor were already dead; the last lay still and whimpered and he could see from the quantity of blood that she would die in the next few minutes. He put his hand on her head and talked to her, resisting the urge for a mercy killing, which would not be understood.

“Upstairs, everybody—we can’t hold the door when they come.” He called over one Ranger he knew to be a weak shot and told him to stay with the dying Ranger on the floor until first sight of anyone, and then to follow. Gregor called four Rangers to him and stepped into the antique glass elevator that was at the center of the open building. The doors closed.

“They have power,” a lanky, serious Ranger named Barbara said.

“Of course,” Gregor said. “This is city hall.”

Through the glass of the elevator he watched the rest of the Rangers swarm up the three flights of stairs into the large foyer and felt proud. By the time the elevator door opened there was another gun battle. A pane of glass next to his head shattered and they crowded out of the elevator and took cover behind a pillar. Guards—city police—were stationed behind other pillars leading up to the entranceway of the mayor’s suites.

In a show of bravado Gregor hobbled into the fray. He stepped into view and his gun was stripped from him by a bullet gone wide. It spooked him and he ducked behind a pillar. Though uninjured, his hand stung from the blow. One of the Rangers kicked the gun back to him and he saw where it’d been hit, a notch above the grip where he’d held it. He decided to desist from impulsive idiocy.

Another of the guards was taken out, and two more Rangers were laid out on the floor, one of them screaming and the sound made him sick and mad.

He could sense the mayor inside. He felt the eagerness of revenge and became impatient.

Behind them forces would come soon—they’d storm up the stairs just as he had. He needed to finish this and be inside. In a lull between useless gunfire—the guards were under excellent cover and their bullets found no mark either—Gregor borrowed a second gun, one for each hand, and stepped into the hallway again. It was quiet for a moment. The screaming had stopped. Those who’d been dying had died or stopped their howling. All he could hear was his old man’s shuffle, the awkward hobble of an overweight man with a bullet wound in his leg. It was a lonely feeling. For a moment it felt like he was the only one there, as if he were limping down the marbled corridors of a nursing home or hospital, seeking out the nurse’s attention, a catheter in one hand, a
Playboy
magazine in the other.

“You are outnumbered. We will not go away. You know how this play ends.” In each hand he held a pistol, and longed for the crutch he’d left behind in the jeep. The leg would not swing forward like he wished. “Give in and live.” Hadn’t he just a moment ago opted against idiocy? Here he was, he nodded wryly, uncaring if this was where he finally fell.

The guard on the left peeked from behind his pillar and shot wide, and Gregor shot back, his left hand nearly as tuned as his right. The shots echoed loud in the quieted chamber and he felt sick about the needless elimination of men who certainly had very little blame in all this. He braced himself for pain or death, his urgency for revenge making him stupid again. “OK,” he said, after the sound of the body slumping to the floor had all etched itself into their minds. “I am lowering my pistols. Give in now, gentlemen. Slide your weapons to the center of the hallway.”

A moment later a rifle skittered across the marble floor. Two handguns followed shortly after. He accepted their surrender and thanked them. He instructed a Ranger to cuff them with their own cuffs.

Adrenalin was coursing through him and his leg was feeling better, and now that he’d started, he wanted more. He made for the mayor’s door without looking back, knowing that behind, his forces had been awed. He could hear a few of the weaker ones lean over and be sick from the violence, as blood spread slick on the floor, the ex-soldiers now more loyal than dogs. With the gun in his right hand he waved them forward toward the door. He very much looked forward to speaking with the mayor.

The door to the mayor’s office opened a crack and Gregor froze, realizing he’d left himself open. If there was a big weapon back there he was finished. A voice called out.

“Hello?”

“We’re still here,” Gregor said.

“Hello, Gregor. We are not armed inside.”

“Who am I
talking to?”

“This is Christopher. You don’t know me.”

“I know who you are,” Gregor said, the photograph he’d taped to the wall of the map room of the mayor and his partner clear in his mind. “How do you know me?”

“General of Sherwood Rangers? Wasn’t that hard to deduce, honestly.”

“Is the mayor here?”

Christopher hesitated. “Yes, he’s here. What do you want?”

Gregor wasn’t sure how to answer the question. The want went deep, carved a ravine down the center of him. There was a dead wife and two boys, a neighborhood crushed by poverty, and a country that he wanted to phoenix. All of these things were unobtainable, and so what could be exchanged? “We want your heads.”

There was a long pause from the doorway. Gregor signaled his Rangers to get in position around the door and at ready.

After a while Christopher replied, “Obviously we’d prefer a different arrangement. Can we make an agreement that there will be no bloodshed while we talk this out?”

“We’re coming in,” Gregor said. “Line up inside the door.”

“No bloodshed?” Christopher said.

“All right, no bloodshed while we talk,” Gregor said easily, the words meaningless to him.

“If you kill us,” Christopher said, “then you have no leverage, and no protection against the National Guard.”

“We have nothing already,” Gregor said. “We have no country to return to.”

“No bloodshed,” Christopher said.

“Goddamnit, you are in no position to ask such a thing.” They had little time—they ought to be under protection of the mayor’s office already. He walked forward and with the tip of his gun pushed the door wide. Christopher stood on the other side. He looked tired. He had aged significantly since the picture on his wall. He wore a white, collared shirt and blue slacks, both of which were cleaner than the clothes Gregor could remember seeing on anyone for quite some time. He smiled, as if it were standard operating procedure to welcome in a load of militants. There was a reasonableness to him, a quality of honesty, and Gregor wished momentarily that this were the mayor in front of him, that he could lay out a list of demands and that they could talk it out without bullshit.

“Well, this is uncomfortable,” Christopher said.

“Where is he?”

“They’re all in there.” He pointed to a big oak door behind them.

Gregor pushed Christopher in front of him and they all filed into a large conference room that had been made into the living room of the mayor’s quarters. With guns drawn they hurried in and spread out, covering the five people there. Gregor sent ten Rangers to seal and guard as much of the way as possible.

At the end of the conference room was a wall of glass with glass doors leading out onto a balcony. He could see the smoke signal of what was left of Sherwood HQ, a line of smoke that tied the earth and sky together.

“Everybody lie down,” Gregor said.

He directed that the mayor and his team be searched. They looked scared and, considering that smoke signal out the window and how his leg felt and how tired he was suddenly, he thought they had good reason to be. He wondered if he could shoot them all and then just
pretend
he had a hostage situation. So much easier than keeping real, live hostages. He stared out the window over the city while his people searched the prisoners.

“You got shot,” the mayor said.

“Yep.”

They were lying in front of the couch next to a giant TV which played the demo for a WWII video game. He recognized it. Jamal had roped him into playing it with him at one time.

“Who shot you?”

Gregor grimaced at the shiny-haired, bruised-eyed dude on the floor, the living symbol, in his mind, of the drought, the TV personality mayor, the crusher of Sherwood. Gregor sat on the plush leather couch with his boots a couple of inches from the mayor’s face. He leaned over so he could get a look at him. He felt hot and wondered if the leg had taken infection. He had not slept or eaten and he still wasn’t entirely sure why he was here.

“You have a kitchen here?”

“I could make you all sandwiches,” Christopher said.

Gregor looked over at the immaculately dressed Christopher lying on the floor and felt a surge of gratefulness toward the man, and a little guilt for having him, who must have fought arduously to keep such a nice outfit in these times, lie on the floor.

“Please,” Gregor said.

“They’re turkey. I have chips and soda too.”

There was a wave of murmuring that went through the Rangers at this news.

Gregor turned and pointed at two Rangers. “Help Christopher.”

Gregor looked down at the mayor again. “You play that?” He gestured toward the video game on TV.

“You?” the mayor said.

“Krauts or allied forces?”

“Both.”

He was looking for reasons to hurt him, he knew that. Any answer the mayor gave was going to piss him off; merely the sound of his voice invoked a desire for violence.

He got up and limped over to the window where he could see Sherwood’s smoke column. The pain in his leg was severe now, with the adrenalin that had gotten him here spent. The red stain in the bandage had grown large and wet. He wondered if they were having trouble putting the fire out or if the intent was to burn the block down.

“How many were arrested and how many were killed?”

The mayor started to get up and Gregor yelled at him to stay down.

“I need you to answer questions, Brandon,” he said, putting extra weight on the name. “Heartless Bartlett,” he tried, leaning into the syllables, “without any extra shit attached to them.”

“We arrested twenty-eight.”

“That’s it?”

“We found forty-one bodies.”

Gregor gritted his teeth. He watched the Rangers go tense, some overcome by the number. “Back down,” he said, waving at a few who’d stood, their faces contorted by emotion. “I want the twenty-eight released.”

“And then you’ll let us go?”

“Very unlikely. But we’re talking. I said I’d talk first.”

“Eighteen of the arrested are in the hospital, including your son and his girlfriend.”

Gregor said nothing.

“You didn’t know he was alive?” The mayor sat up again. “He’s wounded. We could trade.”

“For what? You think I’m going to let you go? Get back on the floor,” Gregor said, as if he was speaking to an idiot child. Gregor limped over to the couch with his gun raised.

“I would prefer not to lie down.”

“You would prefer not to? What is wrong with you?” Gregor gestured to the gun in his own hand, as if to say, see? We’re not alone here.

“You’re not going to shoot me,” the mayor said, “I’m your only bargaining chip.”

That, Gregor realized, was a logical point, though to which he had no attachment. He wanted his son back, and bargaining with this man might allow for that to happen. At the same time, shooting Mayor Bartlett outright would give him such an amount of satisfaction that in this particular moment he couldn’t be sure which he wished for more, and so he put a bullet in the mayor’s thigh exactly where his own bullet wound was.

“Now we match,” Gregor said as the mayor hollered and cussed and writhed on the floor. He didn’t feel like he’d lessened his bargaining power any, either. Gregor sat on the edge of the couch and watched.

“You fucker!” the mayor screamed. “You’ll never see your son again!”

“It’s got more bullets,” Gregor said, gesturing again to his gun.

Several of the mayor’s advisers were weeping, their faces pressed into the floor. He looked up and saw Christopher, whose expression had darkened. He regretted setting the mood in the room then, and again found the emotional complications of hostages wearying.

“Ah hell,” he said. “First aid?”

“In the bathroom,” an adviser said. The mayor had gone white and was breathing heavily and leaking blood onto the wood floor.

Gregor fetched the first-aid kit himself from the small bathroom off the main room. He checked the faucet out of habit and found running water, which made him feel like putting a bullet in the mayor’s other leg. He turned it on and let it dribble over his hand. A miraculous thing, an order of wastefulness out of this time. The stream was weak but steady.

He leaned out of the bathroom. “How is this possible?”

“Water line hooked up to a tank.” Christopher shrugged. “It gets refilled.”

“There’s running water,” he said to his Rangers as he went to attend to the mayor. “One minute each, take turns, don’t waste.”

The kit was good. He laid it out next to the mayor and had two Rangers hold him down. “What a bloody mess,” Gregor said. There was a great pool of stickiness and already he couldn’t remember what he’d shot him for. All that and the bullet had gone to one side, tearing a chunk of flesh out as it passed, an inch and a half from missing altogether. He felt old. He tore open access to the wound and began to dress it as best he could, applying layers of gauze wrapped tightly around his leg. “Maid Marian,” he said.

The mayor’s teeth were clamped and his back arched against the pain. “Where is she?” the mayor said.

Gregor stopped to inspect the mayor. “You don’t know! Interesting,” he said. “She’s a wily one. Thought you might have got her. We really fucked up your pants.” He pointed to his own, where they matched. “Can’t help you with that.”