The Fortress of Clouds

by J. A. J. Peters

  They said it was the only way to call them, so that nothing could be traced. And never from the same payphone. He was running out of phones, and was spending more and more time driving around the city adding to the list of the ones he hadn’t used yet, just in case this thing kept going on. Pay phones. Dirty, ancient pay phones. Why not smoke signals, wouldn’t that be more their style? Or, hey, the mail. Nobody gives a rat’s ass about the mail these days. But, no, it’s gotta be messages from some random pay phone left at some weird, foreign number. And the number didn’t look like it belonged to their country either. Man, the lengths you have to go these days. Getting pretty hard to be hard to find.

  He yawned, and tried to do it quickly, just in case a real person answered, which never happened, or in case the machine picked up faster than usual. The morning sky was that pale yellowy blue that looked almost natural, and he was close enough to the coast that the crap in the air could be mistaken for mist tumbling inland from the ocean. He breathed in deeply, too deeply, and the piss smell of the phone booth overpowered the ocean air. Fourth ring. He scratched the stubble under his chin. The black plastic of the phone had been melted by a junkie with a cigarette lighter, but it still worked. Sixth ring. C’mon. He looked out through the graffiti at the sun rising over the mountains. If you want the biggest, softest, wettest . . . Finally, the machine picked up on the other end. Man, what was that, like fifteen rings? Crazy freaks don’t make it easy to get in touch, do they?

  “Yeah, hi, it’s Sean. Don’t think you check this very often, but I just wanted to give you an . . . update . . . you know, on things?” How was he going to explain this? “So, yeah, I had a bead on it a while back, but the trail’s gone cold. Everything lit up like Christmas morning for a while, then nothing. Dunno what happened. It just . . . guess all I can do is keep waiting, huh? Till I get further instructions, I guess? Or maybe the signal will come back. Right. Anyway, nice, uh, talking to you. As always, I cherish these moments between you and me.” Before hanging up, he listened to the emptiness coming out of the earpiece, to detect even the faintest bit of noise that would tell that his message had been recorded and hadn’t just been delivered into the clouds, as it always felt like it did.

  Because he felt like a cloud, and he chuckled at this, at how fitting it all was. The clouds they were called. Him and who knows how many others. Floating around, pushed by distant winds, devoid of any substance, anything that he could say was him. How many years had he been doing this? Guarding what exactly? He pulled out his wallet and looked at the photos to see, to be reminded of everything that was important.

  He looked down at the device, just to check, even though he knew the screen would be blank. He hadn’t mentioned that he’d actually been surfing up at Ano Nuevo when the thing had gone off. Big, crazy waves coming in ahead of a monster storm. And he hadn’t mentioned what had actually happened when he finally managed to track down the asset. The first opportunity in years and he’d blown it.

  He put the device back into his pocket, sighed, and looked at the neighborhood around him. Cracked pavement, convenience store, weeds. What to do? Once more around the city? Maybe head out to Hermosa and watch things roll. Or see the day begin and the haze brighten from up in the hills. Watch the tail wag at Malibu. Maybe bum around Beverly Hills some more and pretend he was somebody. Somebody. The word caught in his head like his brain had choked on it.

  He got into the truck and drove off a little slower than usual.

  Chapter Thirteen: The Dawnless Days

  Time passed in unidentifiable ways. There was no oceanic morning or rotting sunset to chart their days underground. Day and night were distinguished by following the ebb and flow of the Miscreants going out on their missions in the morning, and then returning, dancing and laughing, with armfuls of loot at night. It had been about two weeks by Ben’s guess. Two weeks of working like a slave while he tried not to think about what had happened to their mother. Two weeks of watching the heaps of stolen goods pile up while Lorenz preached about equality and revolution. And two weeks of Ben and Alison trying to keep Hannah from crying, while trying not to cry themselves.

  None of the other kids seemed as sad as the four Graham children, if it is even possible for two people to be sad in the same way. Other than the four “adult” looking people--Basho, Jawl, Ming, and Cabra--the twenty or so other kids in the Strand all had the same forlorn and distant faces. They had apparently accepted being bound to Lorenz’s army, and they relished in their duties with a sadistic glee.

  The four Graham children were all feeling ill, as if something within them was rearranging itself in the new conditions underground. Ben longed to see the sun, the sky, birds, or anything growing for that matter. All that stuff had to be important for something inside you. It couldn’t be healthy to live below ground for weeks on end. They hadn’t taken their vitamins since they left--maybe that was what was making them sick. Ben was waking up in the middle of the night with a churning nausea that folded him over. Alison said that she felt like something was trying to wrestle its way out of her. Hannah’s stomach had become a bottomless pit for food. Lately at dinner she had become a bit of a novelty act when everyone noticed that she was eating more than Basho, who probably had two hundred pounds on her. But Thomas never complained about feeling anything out of the ordinary.

  When his mind wandered, Ben admitted to himself that the chances of ever finding their mother again were disappearing. In stolen moments together, the four of them still secretly spoke of being able to find a way out of the cavern, but none of them could see how they would ever get past the armed guard.

  After a while, Alison and Hannah almost enjoyed helping Ming maintain the records and inventories in her House of Proof, even if her stories about growing up in the Chinese mountains were way too far-fetched to be true. But Basho and Jawl--to whom Ben and Thomas had been assigned--seemed completely averse to talking at all. As he worked, Jawl would bob his head in time to the music booming from the speakers propped up against the wall. Basho, who sported a permanent grimace as if he were continually stubbing a toe, was lost in his own private world of turmoil and strain. This silence seemed to suit Thomas just fine, since fixing the car was almost instinctual for him, but having to do anything mechanical was pure torture for Ben.

  Ben was supposed to be removing an alternator from what was once a car. First he had to ask Jawl where in fact the alternator was located before discovering that the thing was rusted on quite hopelessly. Once, back in the apartment, in a brief moment of trying to appear useful, Ben had tried to repair their toaster. The whole contraption had exploded in a mess of screws and wires that bore no resemblance to its original form. Thomas had had it back together, repaired, in about three minutes. From that time on, Ben knew that the innate knowledge of the souls and guts of machines was simply a talent he would never possess.

  Ben stopped and tried to make sense of the bass heavy music churning from the massive speakers. A jungle cat growl flowed over random, spastic machine gun drumbeats:

  I can feel you feelin me ya I can feel what you feel cause ya feelin all ovah me.

  The car they were working on was in the process of being converted into something Jawl called a tunnel runner. The idea was to take a car (and by the looks of it, any old car seemed to work as long as it was stolen), strip the entire thing down to its bare skeleton, chop it down to about half its width and length so that it could be maneuvered in some of the narrow tunnel systems, make it completely watertight so that it could drive through deep water, and then mount armor and huge weapons on its sides. Two finished tunnel runners waited like snarling dogs by the main door.

  “Wow, you’ve put a lot of work into this engine,” Ben heard Thomas say enthusiastically from somewhere amid a jumble of parts. Feeling important now that his skills were useful, Thomas walked around the garage area with a bit of a swagger. He even had placed a cigarette behind his ear in an effort to look tough.

  “Yeah, this ol’ car her
e has served us real well,” said Jawl as he considered the wreck before him, “but its time has come to become sumpthin’ greater.” He wiped his greasy hands on his jeans, spat for no particular reason, and re-tucked his long blond hair along the sides of his hat. Jawl looked to be in his late teens or early twenties. From his easy-going mannerisms and long hair, he seemed like he would be happier hunting waves at the beach than welding machinery in an underground cavern. “I replaced the engine las’ month,” Jawl said as he nodded sagely, “and the frame the month ‘fore that.” Ben was struggling with a socket wrench and a rusty bolt underneath the hood, but Thomas sat up with a quizzical look on his face.

  “Well, it’s not the same car then,” said Thomas. “If you’ve replaced every part on it, it’s a completely different machine.”

  Jawl looked insulted to the point of violence. “What? Eh? What ya talkin’ ‘bout? Courses the same car.” He narrowed his eyes in irritation at the young brat who had just questioned him.

  “No, it’s not. That makes no sense,” said Thomas. “Look, it’s like that old saying, if I have a knife and I replace the blade and then replace the handle, then it’s a totally different knife!”

  Basho’s gritty, distressed face appeared from the other side of the car. “Thomas, yeah, it’s a different car. But da soul is the same as da old one, okay?” Basho got up to further defend his point to Thomas. He swallowed as he puffed out his chest, and his raspy, labored breaths made him sound like he had just run a marathon.

  Ben silently put down his wrench in fear that Thomas was about to get hurt by this massive man.

  “You see,” said Basho, his voice suddenly grown soft, “all things carry some sort of . . . of spirit, Thomas. Whether they live or not, you see.”

  Thomas scrunched up his face. “What?”

  “And that spirit lives on forever, up here,” said Basho as he tapped his head. “This car, its soul, will never die, no matter how much it changes, you see.” Basho was speaking this to Ben too, but Ben didn’t know whether he was supposed to agree with Basho every time he said, “you see.” Basho went on, talking to both everyone and no one in particular. As if the situation was futile, Thomas returned under the car. Jawl, who had apparently heard Basho’s explanation before, scratched at something behind his ear and nodded along to the music.

  “It’s all about how you remember things, you see, Ben,” explained Basho as he turned to Ben. “Yes, you see I learned this in da desert. We lost so many good men. When I couldn’t remember all their names, I just . . . lost it, you see.”

  “You lost what?” asked Ben quietly, feeling that he had to say something in reply, but still not sure if this man was a philosopher or a killer, or both. Basho looked at Ben for a few seconds with the same furrowed stare that could be either hatred or reflection.

  “I couldn’t live with da shame, you see. That I was forgettin’ them, that I was losin’ their names, their souls. They were disappearin’. I couldn’t hold on to them and they became jus’ like da goddamnned sand we was fightin’ over. It’s one thing to die, sure, you hafta understand that, you hafta accept that. But we told ourselves that we would never forget each other. You see, in war death is nothin’ compared to forgettin’.”

  Was Ben supposed to say something in consolation? He opened his mouth but Basho continued before he could say anything.

  “So, I decided that for every one of my men who died, I’d have their names tattooed on me. Here, look.” Basho grabbed the bottom of his grease-stained shirt and pulled it over his head. He stood still, his eyes closed as if being examined by a doctor. All over his chest and back were scrawled hundreds of names. Some were printed in perfect, miniscule lettering, while others were written in a large, elaborate scrawl. “That way I’d never forget them,” said Basho with a proud, grim smile.

  “That’s . . . that’s incredible,” was all Ben could manage to say. He had no idea about these wars, but the sight of all the names written on Basho, each one of them a memory of an actual person, made him feel quite uncomfortable.

  “And when I started runnin’ out of room,” continued Basho, “I knew I had to leave. I had to get out of there, before I was a name someone else was tryin’ not to forget, you see. And that was right ‘bout when people started getting sick. Everybody had all these theories on who was causing this sickness, some sayin’ that it was a weapon da enemy was usin’ against us, some sayin’ that da army had given us somethin’ to make us stronger but that somethin’ went bad. An’ then I remember tryin’ to get up one day. We was doin’ a tank run ‘gainst an enemy stronghold, and I remember tryin’ to get up and not bein’ able to. And I just started getting weak all da time, you see.”

  “What . . . what do you think it is?” croaked Ben.

  “They say it’s some new type of cancer. It’s killing all sorts of people and nobody knows why. All I know is when I started feelin’ weak I knew I had to leave.”

  “So what did you do?” Ben could not believe that this huge man somehow suffered from a disease that caused a lack of strength. But his muscular body was at odds with his weathered face, which seemed much older. It was impossible to guess his age. He may have been somewhere in his early twenties according to his taut and bulging body, but his creased skin made him look ancient.

  “I escaped. I deserted da desert, as they say. I used all the money I had gettin’ back. Caught a boat with a bunch of pirates, met Jawl over there, and ended up here, with this group of . . . people.” He looked over the cavern with a smile and a laugh. “Dunno why I came back here though. Should probably have disappeared, but I got caught up with these . . . Miscreants, as some people like to call them. This group is all I got, you see.” He said nothing for a minute and the two of them listened to the clanging of Thomas and Jawl working on the car, and the music thumping in the background. “Bah, listen to me talkin’ all depressin’. I’m sorry, Ben,” Basho said with a sweep of his hand.

  “No, that’s okay, really. I had no idea about any of that.”

  “Don’t you worry, Ben. One of these days it’ll get better around here, you got my word on that.” Ben thought he saw Basho wipe a tear from his eye.

  The music, if one could call it that, so unlike anything Ben had ever heard before, continued to stream out over them.

  I’m a vessel, all vowel and vox, you got nothing to get when you put me in your locks.

  Basho’s story left Ben feeling drained. Back in their apartment, Ben would usually just stare out the window until he felt better. Here, the view in every direction was the same: dirt, cables, pipes, plywood, flashing lights, crates. And lots of scared, crazy-looking kids.

  Ben left Basho, Jawl, and Thomas to their work on the tunnel runner and crept away into the other areas of the cavern, half expecting Lorenz to spot him abandoning his duties. He walked by two kids working with the wires and innards of what looked like some sort of video camera. From their size they looked maybe about Ben’s age. Neither of them looked up as Ben passed. They were lost in a way that had nothing to do with geography. No one belonged here, no one was meant to live their life in an underground army. But everyone seemed to have accepted it. Maybe it was because none of the other kids had come from a place with a loving mother that they weren’t fazed by being a soldier at the age of thirteen.

  Ben stopped. Their mother. Unwanted, useless memories came flooding back. He kept walking across the cavern to where Alison and Hannah were helping Ming sort and catalogue piles of food. But when he got there, he found his two sisters with smiles on their faces, and Ming looking anything but industrious.

  “She’s slept so much over the last few days,” explained Alison as Hannah munched on even more cookies.

  “I’m sooo hungry,” said Hannah.

  “Well, you probably going through growth spurt,” said Ming.

  “You do look older,” Ben said to announce his presence. Hannah did look as if she had aged considerably, but Ben couldn’t decide compared to when.

&n
bsp; “Yep, Han, guess you’re going to grow up big and strong,” said Alison as she messed up Hannah’s hair.

  “Ah, you remind me my own children, before they sold me to video company,” Ming said with an odd chuckle. “Nice little wretches.”

  “What?” asked Ben. Did she just say that her children sold her off?

  “Yes, is usually reverse these days. But, I no blame them. These video games they make, they most addictive things in world. I come home one day and find them all wrapped up in video contraption. Act like they not know me and I ask them where they get everything. Then there is knock at door and some men say I owe all this money to pay for game my kids buy. ‘Course I not have money, so I go work in this people’s factory. Where they make game. Then I realize that game costed so much I never able to leave. So I escape. That’s how I come here.” She sighed and looked at the ground. “I miss my kids. But I not blame them. Besides,” she said as she straightened up, “I useful here. Write everything down.”

  “So all these books are just the records for the Strand?” asked Alison, seeming to want to change the subject from the awkwardness of Ming’s traitorous children.

  “Oh, no. Not all. These day no one need book. Everything done on computer. But I not like when all these books thrown away. My family going way back keep all the records for small royal family in China. I grow up with books all around me. Make me feel at home to have books.” She looked around at the wobbly stacks and smiled.

  “I miss our mother,” said Hannah with a sad squeak. “We were supposed to meet her at the airport, but she wasn’t there.”

  “Oh, you find her again,” said Ming. “Just like I find my kids.”

  “How do you know?” asked Ben, doubtful of her certainty, but not wanting to insult her optimism and faith. “About our mother, I mean.” Maybe Ming was just being respectful, Ben realized.