Henchmen (23 page)

Frank’s ‘65 Lincoln Continental is actually roomy enough to hold all five of us, with room for a soccer team in the trunk.  They seriously don’t make them like this anymore, which is unfortunate.  This thing is like a reclining chair on wheels - no vibration from the road, no engine noise, just the smooth sensation of easy movement.

Jacob climbs in front, and immediately starts fiddling with the stereo looking for the one station that plays all Jacob music, all the time.  I don’t know if it exists, but if it’s out there Jacob will eventually find it.  In the interim we’re treated to ten seconds of every popular song on the radio, and the occasional idiot blathering about Jesus.  Frank just rolls his eyes and asks “Where to?”

Eve doesn’t even stop to think about.  “Waffle House, please.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he says cheerfully.

I’m starving and thirsty, and ready for some comfort food.  While Waffle House will never be considered
haute cuisine
, there are times when you need a huge plate of greasy food and a gigantic stack of pancakes, and this is one of those times.  “Balls to wall, man,” I tell Frank.

“What is it with men and balls?” Jessica asks.

Frank drops the massive engine into gear and we motor toward Avenida Cesar Chavez.

“’Balls to the Wall’ is a phrase from World War II,” Jacob says.  “Doesn’t have anything to do with testicles.”

“Yup,” I say.  “Fighters in World War II had throttles with spheres on them, probably to make them easier to grab.  Anyway, when you pushed to the throttle all the way forward, the balls were at the wall.”

As we’re passing over the tracks we can hear the fire trucks and police converging downtown.  There’s a plume of smoke rising in the sky.  “Hey,” I ask, “can you find some news on the radio?”

So far there’s only a smattering of panicked theories coming in.  Terrorists hit Albuquerque.  It was gangs.  One guy even said it was God’s punishment for our sins.  Oddly, he’s the closest to the truth.  He’s partially correct, just wrong on which god and why.  I’m not sure Dreamer cares about sins or even recognizes that they exist.

The Waffle House is its usual unironic self: heaps of food; gallons of coffee.  The food is always edible, and the people are usually friendly.  We get a table off to the side where it’s relatively quiet, and order copious amounts of breakfast.  While we’re waiting, we sit drinking our coffee, quiet and contemplative.  People all around us have that shocked look people get when they find out something bad has happened - but it didn’t happen to them, and they’re desperately trying to find a way to squeeze some sympathy out of someone because, damn, it was such a tragedy.  The Waffle House isn’t far from downtown, so news probably hit here pretty quickly.  There’s a little T.V. on the counter and everyone is watching it, even the cook.

The talking heads on the T.V. are proclaiming this to be a terrorist attack, probably by Muslim fundamentalists bent on hurting us because of our freedoms.  Scattered reports are coming in about a swarthy man in a suit seen leaving the scene, but no one can seem to locate him. It’s like he just disappeared. 

I don’t recall Dreamer being particularly swarthy, but maybe I just never saw him in good light.

When our food arrives, the waitress asks us if we had seen what happened.  We confessed to being downtown and boogying out as quickly as we could.  Because I’m a jerk sometimes, I tell her I heard it was Mormon separatists behind the bombing.

We could have also gone with the Muslim angle, but Muslims have a hard enough time in America as it is.

Before we dig in, Eve taps her spoon on her coffee cup in a universal sign that everyone needs to hush and listen.  Everyone else in the restaurant is glued to the TV, so we’ve got a decent amount of privacy.  She hands us each an envelope and tells us, thank you very much for the hard work. 

Eve raises her coffee cup in a toast.  “Gentlemen.  And lady.  To evil.”

We all raise our cups and echo “To evil.”

“Do you think he’ll do what he said?” I ask.

“Probably,” Eve replies, “but not necessarily out of any loyalty or desire to help us.  I think his goals temporarily aligned with our goals and that’s good enough.  If it’s any consolation, I think he was genuinely grateful, but I still wouldn’t cross him if I were you.”

“Did you know him?” I ask her.

“No.  Never met him before this morning,” she says, sipping her coffee.  “I’ve heard of him, though.  He vanished sometime in the 30s and no one knew what happened.  Now we know.”

“What did he mean when asked if you chose that thing?” Jessica asks.

“Don’t worry about it,” Eve replies.  “It’s neither your concern nor your business.  Well, friends.  That’s it.  We’ve set the events in motion that will change the world.  In each of those envelopes is a new identity and a bank account with ten million dollars in it.  It’s been a pleasure working with you all.”

“Where are you going?” Frank asks her.

“I’m just going to take a walk,” she says.  “I’d like to see what happens now first-hand.  What about you all?”

“I’ve got a place up in Hesperus that I’m going to retire to for a spell,” I say.  “It’s quiet; the neighbors are far enough away to be out of my hair.  I miss the mountains.”

Jacob finishes his coffee and pours something brown in his glass from a flask. “I think it’s time to get serious about JAMCAO.  I’m gonna head down south and see what I can find.”

“I’m going to drive across the country,” Frank says.  “I’ve got a comfortable car and a full supply of truck-driver songs.”

“And plenty of money to put gas in that beast now.” I quip.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Jessica says.  She looks at me.  “Maybe I’ll go back to California, or a nice beach somewhere quiet.”

“Send me a postcard,” I tell her.

“Jessica,” Jacob says.  “Can you ride a motorcycle?”

“Of course,” She says.  “What kind of loser do you take me for?”

I’d just like to point out; I don’t know how to ride a motorcycle.  Oh, well.  I’ve got plenty of time to learn now.

“Just making sure,” Jacob says.  “You saved my life back there.  That guy would’ve plugged me without thinking about it.  I want you to have this.” He takes off his JAMCAO jacket and hands it to her.  It’s about four sizes too big, but it’s the thought that counts.

I cover the tab. Frank covers the tip. We all go our separate ways.

For now.

Dreamer was as good as his word. It took a while, but he finally made it to Washington, D.C. and laid waste to everything. He wasn’t exactly quiet moving across the country, either.  He hit a church in Kansas, literally flattened the place, and filled the heads of the adults with utterly terrifying dreams.  He refuses to hurt kids, though.

He’s become something of a messiah figure, travelling across the land. Sometimes destroying random things, sometimes building other things.  I can’t see the rhyme or reason, but I’m not a god, so what do I know?

Congress went on paid vacation after they shut down the government this time, but he made enough noise that they decided to get back together again in a special joint session to decide just what was to be done about this dangerous new terrorist.  Even up until the end, they called him a terrorist.  It was like their tiny little minds couldn’t comprehend a danger that wasn’t a terrorist.  Whatever they wanted to call him, he was waiting for them when they met again. 

He shredded both the House and the Senate.  They meet on opposite sides of the Capitol Building and he somehow managed to take out both of them at the same time.  He’d told me he’d been a weapon before, but I never suspected how effective he’d be.  His shadows swarmed over them, buried them in the dark dreams of their own karma.  Some fell to their knees and proclaimed him god.  Some clawed their own eyes out, trying in vain to get the visions out of their heads.  He flared into shapes out of nightmares and tore people limb from limb. 

One senator’s aide, a pretty young brunette, tried to run away, but he’d just flicker and be right in front of her whenever she thought she was safe, like a predator playing with his food.  She’d turn and run one way and he’d flicker and be waiting for her when turned around.  She’d turn to run the other way and he’d flicker and be there, too. 

To say he moved like the flicker men is like saying a first-year dance student moves like a professional ballerina: sure, they’re both doing basically the same thing. But one is graceful and effortless, while the other has to think about it. He chased her through the madness, and finally casually tore her throat out when he got tired of the game.  CSPAN covered the whole thing, since they were on-site for the special Congressional meeting.  When it was over the only members of Congress still alive were the ones who swore fealty to him.  Then he slaughtered them, too.  It was pretty brutal.  I couldn’t even finish my popcorn while I was watching it. 

Considering Congress’s approval ratings in the polls, it was unsurprising that the majority of the people didn’t have much of a problem with this.

This left the country in something of a lurch.  Our system has always been based on the checks and balances provided by the legislative, executive and judicial branches, and now the entire legislative branch of the government was gone.  To make things even more interesting, no one in the government had a contingency plan about what should happen if all of Congress was suddenly wiped out.  I think they all assumed if the entire legislative branch were to fall, the entire government would collapse.  It didn’t exactly turn out that way, and there are already greedy assholes all over the country lining up to run in the upcoming special elections.

Thing is, though, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of interest among the people for actually going to the polls and, you know, voting for any of these guys.  It’s like a couple of months without hearing about how Congress had screwed up this, that, or the other thing, was like a breath of fresh air.  It’ll get reformed eventually, but it’s been a pleasant time without them. 

We didn’t quite get anarchy in the streets, which is what I was personally hoping for. Instead, we found regular people could come together for a brief time and take over the running of the country.  It was like everyone woke up, and realized they needed to do something other than watch T.V. and complain about things.  With any luck, the running of the country will remain in the hands of regular people.  Of course, regular people are just as greedy and vulnerable as some of the old families, so we’ll have to see how it turns out.

Dreamer’s still in D.C. somewhere, though, and everyone knows it.  To some he’s a hero. To others, he’s a villain.  So it goes.  Every place he went dreams become slightly more real and reality becomes slightly more dreamy.  It’s difficult to describe.  In places where he really went wild, reality became softer, and the dream world took root. 

The section of Albuquerque where he tore through Saxton’s men is completely sealed off.  Actually, the whole damn downtown is sealed off.  For all the sealing-off, things still sneak out from time to time - which isn’t terribly surprising. How do you hold in dreams, anyway?  Fortunately, the things that sneak out don’t last too long.  Personally, I think his dreams can’t hold themselves together in reality for very long.

D.C. was another matter entirely.  He’s physically there and the dream world is much closer to the real world.  The military has what’s left of the city surrounded, and is actively shooting anyone who tries to enter, and anyone or anything that tries to leave.  The “important” people were evacuated shortly after the incident, leaving behind only the regular citizens, and no one in government seems to care about them.  They’ve been completely written off, kind of like they were before this whole unpleasantness.

There are rumors of things, half-hidden in the shadows of D.C.

At first the military was more than happy to try to help people escaping, but that all came crashing to a halt when things that looked like people started trying to get out, too.  What looked like a woman carrying a baby turned into something horrifying, all teeth and no eyes and it tore three soldiers in half before they took it down with a flame-thrower

Twisted and horrible things, reeking of ill-gotten power and madness stalk the city.  At first I had assumed these were just itinerant politicians, but it turns out that may not be the case.  Every now and then someone will make a break for the border, and if the military doesn’t cut them down, something will wrap around them and drag them screaming back into the ruins of the city.

A couple of teams have been sent in to find out what’s happening, but they never make it back out.  The last team made it a full half-hour before the surrounding military force reported things coming out of the mist.  Gunfire, screams, silence.  I understand they’re working on sending in some of the newer land-based drones now.  We’ll see how long those last.

The scary thing about D.C. is the area of… infection? seems to be spreading.  Every day, the military has to pull back a little bit.  I suspect Dreamer has established his new home there.  It was never what you would call a happy city. A lot of bad things have happened there, so I imagine the dreams there are delicious.

I’ve spent some time researching exactly what Dreamer is.  This is not as easy as you would think it would be.  In this era we’re used to having all information right at our fingertips, but there’s very little legitimate information on him out there.  Oh, sure, there are plenty of fanboi-type websites dedicated to Dreamer, and a whole slew of charlatans who just made some stuff up and are trying to cash in on it. There’s very little in the way of hard evidence.  Snopes.com is way out of their league when it comes to things like this, although Snopes was the only group that managed to figure out where Dreamer first appeared.  Hint: It was Albuquerque, NM. (Not the Moon, as some have speculated.)

All I’ve managed to find out so far has come from hitting libraries, and a crazy used book store in Durango.  Libraries, in these days of the Information Superhighway (never thought you’d hear that term again, did you?), have fallen out of fashion, but they’re still the go-to place for any kind of original research.  A lot of the books in the world have been digitized, their contents digested into pulpy zeroes and one, and placed on the Internet, but most of the world’s books are still only available in good, old-fashioned paper.  The best books are always hidden away in some backwater library, relegated to the dusty parts of the stacks that no one goes into anymore except for the kids looking for some private time.

I now have library cards at half a dozen libraries in towns around here and the enmity of a bunch of teenagers who just wanted to get laid in a library.

It took me several days of searching the Southwest Book Trader in Durango, Colorado, but I finally located a book on dreams that wasn’t written by a hippie.  There’s not much about Dreamer directly, but apparently some of the local tribes worshipped a “handsomely outfitted” gentleman who could control dreams.  He got completely out of control, and they managed to stop him or at least drive him off somehow.  Unfortunately the book didn’t know how.  Those same tribes are usually excellent at remembering things, so someone still knows how.  Even then they couldn’t decide if he was a hero or a villain.

Here’s what I think:  Evil is that thing that we don’t want to happen to us.  If it happens to someone else, someone we don’t agree with, though, it’s justice.

****

I’ve managed to keep in touch with almost everyone in our old group. 

Jacob is running a biker gang - shit,
motorcycle club,
down in Las Cruces.  They’ve apparently been running guns up and down through Mexico, probably for Mr. Smith.  Jacob’s MC has grown to about ten guys, most of whom are serious about being bikers.  They nearly gutted one guy out when they found out he was an accountant, but the accountant won the fight and got to stay.  He must have been one tough hombre; he had to fight two other members of the MC to stay in.  I think I’ll look that guy up if I ever file taxes again.

Frank is up in the Pacific Northwest somewhere, breaking into random buildings for the hell of it.  We email back and forth every now and then.  He’s bored.  He’s tasted too much of the exciting life to ever be happy being normal.  We’re planning a heist for the spring, for old time’s sake.

No one’s heard from Eve since she walked out the door of the Waffle House.  I keep having this feeling I’ll wake up one morning and she’ll be sacked out on my couch, and all my beer will be gone.

I actually got a postcard from Jessica not too long ago.  It was addressed to Scratty McNutty, Hesperus, CO.  It’s mute testimony to the size of this community that the postcard made it to me.  She’s living on the beach somewhere in the Baja peninsula and misses green chile cheeseburgers.  The front of the postcard was a picture of her in a black bikini.  Well played, Jessica.  Well played.

Saxton was on the news last night spreading pictures of me all over the damned place, and accusing me of associating with some terrorist organization.  I honestly don’t know how he’s still alive.  I’ve shot that bastard in the face twice, and Jacob and Frank both dropped buildings on him, and yet he keeps coming back.  Next time we meet, I’m taking his head home with me.

Three months have passed, and my little house outside of Hesperus is nice and cozy.  Fall has turned the forest into an explosion of colors that rivals any Fourth of July display.  At night I can see the stars again.  I hadn’t realized how much I missed the stars. 

My neighbors, such as they are, don’t know what I’ve done. I suspect they’d approve anyway.  People move to places like this to get away not only from other people, but for a chance to feel like they’re free of governments and rules.  They want to barbeque and shoot things and not worry about consequences.  I love them all.

It’s a simpler life, and I really like it, but I’ve got a feeling I shouldn’t get too used to it.