New Title 1 (9 page)

“
Hop off,” I said to the robot.

It jumped off the roof of the truck and landed on the ground next to me like a bomb going off.

“
Hold out your arms.”

The robot dutifully held out its arms. I handed it a rocket launcher and a very large machine gun with a giant banana clip. That should last him for a while. I grabbed a machine gun for myself and stuffed as many grenades as I could into my pockets.

I looked at the robot. “Now, don’t shoot until I tell you to but if I do, aim for the windows in the house. If you see Baxter… if you see
anyone
in the house, aim for them. Okay?”

“
Okay. I’m a thinking traveling robot.”

“
Yes.” I paused. “And what do you think about this?”

“
This?”

“
Getting Baxter out of my house.”

“
He will get out of your house.”

“
Yes, but what do you think about that?”

“
He will get dead.”

“
Does that bother you?”

“
I am a thinking traveling robot.”

He will get dead
. I thought about those words. Baxter was the man who I had told I could never kill another human being. And now I was trying to kill Baxter. Did that make me a liar? A hypocrite? If I condoned murder but didn’t condone war, was there some kind of flaw in my thinking? Did that mean I could only condone murder if there was some personal gain to be had from it? But this was a matter of defense, wasn’t it? Wasn’t I defending my home? Wouldn’t I condone war if people were trying to invade the United States of Everything, as opposed to us invading them?

I shrugged it all away. I had to. Now was not the time to have these thoughts. What did Corporal Grimes call them? Soft thoughts? The only thing I knew was that there was a miserable little fucker in the house I had bought and paid for and I had to get that miserable little fucker out of the house by any means necessary.

Yes, indeed. By any fucking means necessary.

And I had a whole truckload of means.

Thirty-three

Apparently when I thought of the word ARSNAL I was pretty thorough. Beside my veritable mountain of weaponry was a bullhorn. Perfect. I turned it on and aimed it toward the house.

“
Baxter!”

I was hoping he would either show his face or begin firing. He did neither. The little fucker.

“
Baxter! I’M GIVING YOU TEN SECONDS TO VACATE MY HOUSE OR I WILL OPEN FIRE.” Should I have said my robot and I will open fire? Did that sound more intimidating?

The neighborhood crowd was beginning to congregate again. Women, men, children, all gathered around my heavily armed robot and the back end of the truck and stood staring. I lowered the bullhorn from my mouth.

“
You people should not be here,” I said. “You need to get back in your homes. Or, better yet, get as far away as possible.” I almost told them to pretend a tornado was coming but then they would only go as far as their porches.

My neighbor looked at me. His eyes looked resigned and his white mustache was drooping. “That the guy who shot Paula?” He pointed to the house.

“
Who?”

“
Paula. You know, when you was leaving earlier…”

“
Yeah. That’s him. His name's Baxter Baxter. He works for the government.”

“
I don’t care who the hell he works for, we want him gone. Need any help?”

I probably needed all the help I could get but I didn’t want to implicate any of these people in my struggle. “I couldn’t possibly ask you to help. It’s too dangerous. This is my battle.”

“
If that shit’s in that house, then it’s all of our battles.”

“
I couldn’t be responsible for that. Fighting this guy would make you guilty of all kinds of crimes, the punishments for which would be very severe.”

“
Suit yourself then.” He walked back to the small crowd of people.

I raised the bullhorn to my mouth once again. If I wasn’t wearing a uniform, at least I could be very very loud. “YOU PEOPLE NEED TO GO BACK INTO YOUR HOMES. YOU ARE IN DANGER IF YOU STAY OUT HERE.” It was probably even more intimidating since I assumed they couldn’t see the bullhorn.

Baxter popped up from the attic window and shot my wrist. The bullhorn went flying and clattered onto the road. The crowd dispersed. My hand was barely hanging on to the wrist. I thought about picking up the bullhorn and commencing my count. Probably wouldn’t do a lot of good. With my good hand, I grabbed one of the grenades from my pocket, pulled the pin with my teeth and tossed it toward the window. It didn’t come anywhere close. It clanked off the aluminum siding, hit the grass and began rolling back toward me. I ran behind the trunk. The grenade went off and blew up the front of the truck, dirt and metal raining down. I grabbed the gun from the waistband of pants and fired a couple of shots at the window. At least one of them went into the house, the other one only creating a steel blossom in the siding.

Baxter appeared again and fired off two more rounds. The first took off my left ear. The other one hit just above my right eye, knocking it loose and sending my vision all skewed. It took me a moment to realize it, but this was serious. If he knocked out both my eyes then I was pretty much done for. It was time for the robot.

“
Robot! Open fire!”

Immediately, things became very confusing and very loud.

Thirty-four

I ducked behind the back of the truck and the robot moved to the forefront. I saw it raise both arms—one with a rocket launcher and the other with a semi-automatic assault rifle—and commence firing at the house. I trained my weapon on the attic window and fired continuously.

There was smoke and fire everywhere.

Baxter fought back with equal wrath, chucking grenades between volleys of machinegun fire.

Holes opened up in the house and it was only after a few seconds that what I was fighting for was completely useless but I continued anyway.

Baxter appeared on the top of the burning house. My injured eye had healed somewhat and I could tell he was missing an arm and only had half his head. His clothes were burning, hunks of his flesh melting and sliding off the bone.

Fuck.

Of course, why hadn’t I thought of that? Baxter knew about that underground spring. He knew about whatever it was that made me invincible. He was invincible too.

Then I had another terrifying thought. Probably my most terrifying yet. If Baxter knew about it then wasn’t it possible the whole fucking army knew about it? That would certainly explain how the United States of Few became the United States of Everything.

He would never give up.

He would never surrender.

He continued raining down bullets and grenades.

I almost quit. I almost told the robot to stop. I almost hopped on and asked him to fly me anywhere that wasn’t loud and wasn’t exploding and wasn’t on fire.

But Baxter was still in my house. He was on my house, standing there like some conquering demon god and I didn’t want to let him win.

That was what it came down to.

I didn’t want to let him win.

“
Robot!”

The robot ceased firing and looked me. A grenade explosion took off his leg. It didn’t seem to bother him. He hopped over.

“
We need to push this truck into the house.”

Dutifully, the robot picked up the trailer of the truck and hurled it at the house. The explosion was immense, blowing out dirt and smoke and fire. I hid behind the towering robot and when I looked toward my house, through the smoke, nearly a minute later, there was nothing except a hole. Beyond the intense ringing in my ears, there was silence.

The silence was broken by a hum and then a rumbling and then the sky and the whole street lit up.

Thirty-five

Through the swirling confusion and the riot of sound I had a moment of clarity. Or maybe it was a vision, stark and real. Between the crowded houses on the streets, tanks and army jeeps rolled. Choppers flew just over the roofs. Planes circled the outskirts of the city, ready to swoop in and drop their bombs. While my survival may have at one time been a secret, my invincibility certainly wasn’t. The smoke continued to clear and I saw Baxter in the bottom of the hole, rising up to his knees. Perhaps he had been invincible much longer than I had and his regenerative powers were greater. I could practically see the skin and bone reforming around him. He hoisted up a rocket launcher and fired it at the robot. The robot exploded into a million sticks and shards and motes of rust, many of them penetrating me. I was now sure of my theory. If he hadn’t ingested the water, he wouldn’t have been able to see the robot.

I was tired of fighting.

I hadn’t really wanted to kill Baxter. I just wanted him out of my house. And if I killed him now, what would it matter? Someone would be there to come along and either vaporize me or take me away to some prison camp. And that, I figured, was how this new army was recruited. If you have anything, someone will take it. And they will keep taking until you have absolutely nothing left. They will reduce you to the point where you can’t do anything but fight. And if it’s a choice between fighting or going to a prison then, well, isn’t that fighting for freedom?

“
Saul Dressing! Drop your weapons!”

I didn’t have any weapons to drop.

I didn’t want to surrender but I didn’t really see any other choice. To continue fighting would have been suicide.

It would take me forever to die and the army would just keep coming with its guns and its bombs. They would level everything. It wouldn’t matter who lived in the houses. It wouldn’t matter that they had never done anything wrong, anything to deserve this. And I would have been the cause. They would kill many to get to me.

I began to raise my arms and felt something grab them. It was a powerful grip. I was yanked into the darkness. I was being pushed toward a wall. On the wall was written: NOWARE.

I collapsed through the wall as they opened fire, shells entering my back before the wall closed again. Hopefully the shells obliterated the wall so no one else could come through. But I wouldn’t know because I wasn’t in my neighborhood anymore.

Conclusion

Even though I should have been used to fire, the sunlight scalded my eyes. Gradually adjusting, I took in the panorama. I was in a place that looked very much like Grisnos. A person who looked very much like Bob Weathers stood beside me, clutching my arm.

“
Bob.”

“
Saul.”

“
Why are we back at Grisnos?”

“
This is not Grisnos. This is Nowhere. They’ll never find us here.”

“
I’m sure you thought the same thing about Grisnos.”

“
Grisnos had the water. The special water. You know about the special water. I led you to the special water.”

I nodded.

“
Nowhere has nothing.” He waved his arms expansively and smiled, as though desolation was the greatest thing in the world. “But it has everything.” He tapped his temple with a finger. “Right here. Me. You. We make everything. Now we need to think.”

He bent down and began scrawling on the dirt.

THEENKING TABEL

And there was a table. It was a small table, one that looked designed for no purpose other than thinking. He wrote CHARE on either side of the table and there were two chairs. We each sat down. Two men sitting at a table in a vast desert under an endless blue sky.

We sat and we talked and we planned. When I told Bob my theory about the army sending potential soldiers to Grisnos as recruits, so they would each become invincible, he told me I wasn’t wrong. That was the way it had been. Bob as some sort of mediator. But that wasn’t enough. The army had wanted to own the “special water.” They wanted to know what made the village around them, how the people of Grisnos were able to build things without any raw material. Bob was prepared to sell the water to them even though the money would have been useless to him. He refused to tell them about his own charred body part, what turned the words into objects. When I asked him why he didn’t just invent something to defend himself with he said that would have been crazy, only a madman would do something like that. “I invent something like that, it’s only a matter of time before they lay hands on it and use it against me.” But, I thought, he
had
made something like that. If he wasn’t going to admit to it, I wasn’t going to press him. Some things are better left unspoken. I asked him why he had chosen me, figuring he would have had to have sought me out in order to drag me into Nowhere. “Because you’re the only one who read
Climax and Anti-climax
.” It sounded like a good enough reason. Maybe there was something in that book that allowed me to see the connection between the marks my fingers left in the dirt and the words Bob had scrawled.

We slowly began building Nowhere, neither one of us wanting to think what would happen when our respective charred fingers ran out. We created only the essentials: a field to give us food, a house to give us shelter, a few books and some music to pass the time, water to quench our thirst. We each allowed ourselves a modicum of pleasure. Bob created a small whiskey bar. I created a small coffee shop and let my toenails grow into long, sturdy talons.