Interfictions 2 (33 page)

A giant sloth brayed outside his window. Only gentle animals lived in the complex anymore, but he still didn't trust them. Then he heard the monorail approaching, creaking through the rain. He sighed and went out to his front porch and watched the monorail come in.

Inside the front car was that sloth, large as a horse, pawing at the windows. The monorail was automated. Someone from another part of the complex must have lured the sloth onto the monorail and sent it his way. The monorail halted. Could it have been the super? (The super liked to call himself the zookeeper. But he was really just an asshole.)

"Lion savannah,” the monorail's calming voice said. “Please exit carefully.” The doors to the car, which should have been welded shut with rust years ago, creaked open, and the sloth exited onto the platform in front of Roger's house. The platform was narrow, but the sloth had sure feet and, bobbing its head, moved closer to Roger's front door. Its eyes were yellow and shot.

Below him, the waves of rain rustled the sedge. Swampy run-off. He didn't like venturing down there in the best of conditions, or traveling far on foot. Green Path to the theater, Red Path to the general store, Purple Path to the megafauna barn. No. He took the monorail for Friday night cinema. The other tenants liked what they showed on the giant screen more than he did. They were the type of people who enjoyed movies from Bangladesh that didn't make sense—lots of violence, but in the wrong ways and places (Mughal romantic comedies that somehow ended in bloodbaths; a series of six galling musicals following the Ural mujahideen). Roger allowed his writers-in-residence to visit the cinema only once a month. He didn't want their minds poisoned any more than necessary. Other years he had four, five writers from his readerly province learn from him. Numbers dwindled, though. He wasn't sure the sole young woman given to him was up for the job. The monorail closed its doors and creaked forward to the primate house. Roger took a step back and clanged the bell next to his front door. He didn't stop until his apprentice arrived. The sloth was taking its time. The apprentice was taller than him, and the tan uniform was too short in the sleeves for her. She was out of breath, and she smelled like woodsmoke. The walkway from the monorail platform to Roger's raised porch was about twenty feet and had flimsy railings on each side. The house itself was on concrete pillars above the veldt. There was nowhere for the sloth to go except forward, and it did. But it was groggy. The sloth had to have been tranquilized.

As it moved closer, Roger could see that something glowing was attached to the fur on its side.

"Apprentice, see what's on its fur."

"What? No."

"Do not disobey a direct order!"

She sighed.

"Did you bring your sidearm?” he said.

She shook her head. “I ... I was fixing the furnace, like you told me to."

"It's moments like these that provide you the writing material that will change your life forever!” he barked. “And to fully seize the moment, you need to be properly armed. That's the bedrock of this household, do you understand?"

She slowly nodded.

He put a hand on her shoulder and tried to look her in the eye, though she would not meet his gaze. “Fetch your sidearm, and also the rocket launcher from my study."

"Which one?” she asked.

He paused, not wanting to seem too greedy for carnage in front of her. “The small one."

While she was in the house, the sloth did an ambling circle toward him and then shuffled sideways. He darted forward, thinking to himself how brave and stupid he was. But he also wanted to prove to his apprentice that he would not make her do what he would not do himself.

The sloth reeked like shit, and underneath the fur Roger could see sores. Reconstituted, it was not made for these times. He could also see that some bastard had tagged the sloth's hide with iridescent paint. It was a message:

BIG MURDERER

FUCK OFF N DIE

LEAVE

"I've got the weapons,” the apprentice said, the pistol in her holster and the rocket launcher slung over her shoulder. “I also brought a notebook and pen...” She managed to smile. “In case the inspiration—"

"Give me that,” he said, taking the rocket launcher from her, turning off the safety settings. His first thought, which immediately shamed him, was to kill her, to point the rocket launcher ten feet from her chest and to blow a hole through her and send the rest of her into the old lion sanctuary below. His hands shook; he had trouble keeping the rocket launcher level as he arced it past her body—a clear safety violation, how could he be teaching her anything—and toward the sloth. The storm was tapering, though the wind pushed the rain back and forth through the air.

"This is just another example of how the world hates us and our ideas,” he said. “You have to keep being strong ... persisting..."

"What's on the fur?” she said. His outbursts and directives were not reaching her. She was getting numb; too numb for his training to have proper effects. She was broken down, but he honestly didn't know whether he had the strength to build her up again. “Do you want me to—"

"It's nothing,” he said. “It's one of those Shiite gang symbols."

"That's not nothing,” she said.

The sloth raised its head, took a few dizzy steps, and lumbered toward them.

"Kill it!” she shouted at Roger.

He tried to steady himself, lowered his center of gravity. The sloth's tongue sloshed gray. It was a herbivore, but didn't they mix in leopard DNA? Did the zookeeper tell him that once? His feet slipped, and as he fell forward his finger pushed forward on the trigger. The shot screamed, a wall of fire and metal vapor rushed toward him.

He woke up in the middle of the night, on his bed, with the fireplace blazing. The apprentice stood over him.

"You broke your arm,” she said. “I splinted it."

"The sloth...” he said.

"The rocket smashed into the walkway,” she said. Her voice was flat. “The walkway collapsed and the sloth went down. Don't worry. I set up a rope bridge across."

"That can't be safe..."

"It's safe enough. I worked the whole day on it."

He tried to sit up. “I need to call the complex security ... whoever did this..."

She gently pushed him down on his good shoulder. “Don't worry. I've already taken care of it. You shouldn't have to tolerate that kind of attack.” She took out her notebook, flipping through the corners, and handed it to him. “I've written all about it. I free-wrote all night."

He took it from her. He wanted to say he was proud of her.

"But you shouldn't read it until you're feeling better,” she said. “I don't know what's going to happen to us, Roger."

"What...” He didn't have the strength. He smelled napalm and ash, still. He had assumed it was from her earlier chores.

"I learned explosives pretty well from my father. He used to take down Omaha rail lines in the wars. Did you know that you have bags and bags of potash in the basement?"

When she left the bedroom to set up a defensive perimeter, he read her exercise book.

THIRD-PERSON EXERCISE: MOMENT OF PLOT RESOLUTION

Charity McClune knew who had come to kill them: Dumbocrats, in league with homosexual imams and ecoterrorist Jews, with Mexican foot soldiers brought in from their misguided revolutions, financed by turban-wearing geothermal vice lords from India. They would stop at nothing. She had to stop them. How fitting that the seeds of their own destruction would be carried on a monorail—the transportation of choice for Communists and their broken dreams. She smirked as she assessed her handiwork. She had blond hair and blue eyes, blue like the glacier waters of her hometown in Free Alaska. She knew the price of freedom and was willing to pay any price for it. Those other people, they were full of hate for her and her teacher, a great American—

He flipped forward, hands barely under control.

Only one right path lies before her. In the pure fire of justice her world would be cleansed. Looking up, she almost saw in a cloudface her father's face, smiling down on her. She missed him so much, and the wind pressed up a gentle breeze on her face as her chief colonel nodded.

"'Bring down the noise, Charity!” he exclaimed, his jaw set.

As she clenched the trigger—

Roger closed the notebook. “Total shit,” he said, falling asleep, drifting backward to the air force bases of his prime, when he had been a prime mover, an adviser, a prophet of policy. No one would ever understand, not even the apprentice. The only ones who understood were long dead, at one time laid to rest in desecrated Arlington graves: the rear admirals who had requested signed copies of
Fierce Power
by the boxload for mandatory frigate book clubs; the Secretary of Information and Coercion who sent his daughter to shadow him for a week for a school project; and, of course, the president, the commander in chief, his commander in chief. Roger imagined that others in the inner circle of Washington, Lincoln, and Reagan must have felt the same thrill—not only to be living at the same time as an architect of history, but to advise great men and great decisions, by sheer accident more than anything else. He was, after all, a writer of stories, an entertainer, and he never let himself forget that. And yet ... he was there when the world changed. He was there. He was there in the bunker, a mile underneath Minot. El Paso burning, Dallas burning, the District of Columbia cordoned, Chinese peacekeepers amassing on the Canadian border, and the choice resting on heavy shoulders.

"Tell me what to do,” the president said to him in the bunker's lounge, velvet upholstery muffling any sound, any klaxons and shouts. The words and the president's face echoed in the chambers of his sleep. “Tell me what to do, Roger."

"Your advisers, sir...” Roger said, swirling his bourbon and looking down into it.

"I don't trust them. Don't trust any of them. You know that, Roger.” The president could get petulant without enough sleep, but who wouldn't?

"I do know that, sir. I would...” Roger set his bourbon down on a stack of his own paperbacks on the coffee table. A poster of Roger on the door stared back at Roger—arms crossed, wearing sunglasses, an ammo belt draped over his shoulders like a scarf, a baseball cap that had embroidered on it: DON'T TREAD ON ME, and underneath that: KILL ZONE. Roger tried to think of what that Roger would do, what Mick Solon would do.

"You have to root out the problem at its source, sir.” The commander-in-chief stared at Roger. “Do you understand what I mean, sir?"

The president thought about this, licking his lips. “Do you mean to bomb Mexico City? Nuclearly?"

Roger shrugged and tried to keep his eyes on the president. When the president didn't say anything, Roger said, “Have you seen the war games for that, sir? With the bunker busters?” Roger had no idea whether war games for that even existed, or what his real advisors would say.

"No ... no. But maybe that's for the better.” The president stood up, and Roger followed suit. The president reached out to shake hands, and Roger moved right away to salute, leaving the president's hand dangling there. But then the president returned the salute.

"Stay here as long as you want,” the president said before leaving, and in two hours the bombers were in the air, reaching their cruising altitude. And Roger did stay in the bunker, for five months, as winter set in, and then—instead of spring—winter set in again throughout the Americas. Then, after that, another winter of fog and ash, and the president's hanging at Mount Vernon. Then the third winter skipped right to fall, winds of acid and ice, the fall of two or three provisional governments, and then no governments at all, at least in the old sense of the word. Roger took a Humvee from Minot to Minneapolis, and he had to pay for the trip with his collection of Liberty dollar coins. The soldiers never talked with him, joshed with him, as they had before. The zoo was the safest place he could find.

Of course, the world stabilized, after a fashion, and he was able to write again. People were still hungry for his stories. They were the same people as before, for the most part, the same survivors. And their children, who had little in the way of television, grew up with Mick Solon instead. Roger found an agent who understood this—his old agent having disappeared in the Manhattan reorganizations. Enclaves still believed in the rightness of Mick's causes, that Mexico Moon was necessary and cleansing, only one salvo in the war for civilization.

Roger obliged them.

When he woke from his long sleep, he was put under house arrest. Not in so many words; no one announced this to him. But there was always an armed groundskeeper within sight of his house. The apprentice had disappeared and was found a few days later on the outskirts of the old zoo, where she had set up a makeshift bomb-making factory and blown herself up by accident. The apprentice's family demanded that Roger pay for her funeral. He used the request for a fire-starter. There was no body, he wanted to tell them. How can you bury a person without a body? Do you want to bury her jaw? Her femur? Her dental records? The investigation into the destruction of the sloth and the walkway found him neither guilty nor innocent, but rather complicit in a long-standing pattern of harboring and brainwashing terrorists. No charges came, though. On the other hand, they did arrest the fucker who had drugged the giant sloth—tampering with megafauna was a serious crime. She was one of the medical assistants who administered chemo at the free clinic and hated everything Roger stood for. He tried to follow her trial on the daily bulletins, but the painkillers he took for his legs would not let him focus on anything for too long, except for sleep. He tried to call his agent but couldn't remember the right access codes, and the screen would always stay blank, no matter what he did. Then in the middle of the night he heard the apprentice calling for him, pausing with her blowtorch and asking, Isn't this what you would want me to do? And he would have said, No, not exactly—see, action has to be clean like writing is clean; there have to be clear consequences and no loose ends. Self-defense has to be guided by the conscience of liberty. The fight has to be a true one. People just want to forget about their problems. Also, you're really fucking scaring me.