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.
Each night, as we watched the stars, always shifting and changing, there was something unspoken between us. Not just what Bob had done to put an end to Grisnos and constant war. Something else. Something even deeper and more far reaching. We waited to see an airplane or a helicopter or a parachute blotting out the sun. It was unlikely, but the thought was always there, tickling the backs of our brains.
Gradually other people began to come. I don’t know how they found us. They were different but we welcomed them. We had plenty of land, plenty of space. We welcomed the company.
Then we stopped looking at the skies and started looking around us. These new people seemed pure and innocent but we wondered if they were thinking the same things we were. Thinking the same things about us. Thinking about that grain of greed or violence or whatever it is that turns people against one another.
Bob and I continued to have our nightly sessions at the thinking table. Over time, everyone began coming to these sessions. The table remained the same size but there were now many chairs gathered around it. Together, we sat there and we talked and we thought and we planned a war against a monster. It was a war that didn’t involve any guns or property or religion or resources. It was a real war. Perhaps the only war.
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