“Okay, let her through.”
“Excuse me?”
“She’s wearing a wedding dress, dude. And a watch.”
They backed a few feet away from me and lowered their voices to discuss basically the possibility of furthering my existence. I could still hear them, of course.
“He said to only call him for an emergency. She’s one of ours. They don’t wear watches.”
“I have a bad feeling about this.”
“Even if there’s a small chance she’s not, then so what? She could have been a stowaway somehow, happens every once and a while. And what damage could she do? She looks like she’s twelve.”
Almost fourteen, I stopped myself from saying.
He didn’t seem convinced so I went to seal the deal, “You know, if you don’t let me through, I’m sure that guy on the telephone will be wondering where I am about now. You don’t want a phone call from him, do you?” I had to take chances on what little information these guys were dropping in front of me.
They looked at me, contemplating.
“I have somewhere I need to be,” I said, looking down at my white dress. “I’m running late.”
“I’m sure that they would wait for you, being the bride an’ all.”
“I didn’t know one could serve so young. I guess, pays for college. And you get health insurance. Well, some. Let’s let her go.”
One guy threw up his hands, “Okay, man. But I was not here when you did this.”
“All right. You’re cleared. Your service is invaluable to the country.”
“About time,” I sighed and pulled forward.
I could see now that there was just one person in the white truck. It was a little white blur with a black dot but I could tell what kind of vehicle it was. The black little dot was sitting on the right side.
It was a goddamned mail truck.
He kept his distance. There weren’t any other cars out on the road. If he wanted to take me out, he could, without witnesses.
Not that a witness would mean anything. All witnesses were scumbags, just waiting around on street corners hoping to see an officer shoot a civilian. Then the witness could collect a few hundred dollars on the spot in exchange for silence.
I was trying to convince myself that this truck just happened to be going my way but then the others appeared.
And it was then I realized it wasn’t even Sunday. No mail delivery today.
I couldn’t take the chance that it was just coincidence. Denial was one of those flaws that a person in a story had that led to tragic death.
But not my tragic death. Theirs.
I pressed my foot down on the pedal as soon as my exit sign appeared.
And then somehow I was lying on the ground with tiny bits of glass in my hair like a china doll with dandruff. The car I had been driving was facing the opposite direction. The windshield had a huge crack and the two back wheels were gone. As if they were balloons and popped.
The soldiers, there were three of them, had shot at me (I must have jumped about double my height for each bang) but none of the bullets came close.
I got up, utterly defenseless.
They stood in a circle around me on the highway with their guns and handcuffs out. But all I could think of was the game called Gray Duck. Like in school. All the kids would sit in a circle and one kid goes around, saying “duck,” “duck,” “duck.” The unlucky one would be named “goose” and had to chase the one kid around the circle, hoping to catch him. Or her.
Like they were posing as animal control and trying to catch me with a big butterfly net.
Well, I wasn’t no goose.
I turned to some sort of sergeant or someone of higher power than the rest of them (all the patches and pins were a dead giveaway) and waved my middle finger at him.
“For a soldier, you sure are a shit shooter. Bet you couldn’t shoot this,” I said. I hoped they shoot off my finger and not my head. I could afford to lose a limb but nothing else.
The man lowered his gun, looked back at his boys, and they all laughed.
Through the windows I could see a fourth soldier behind the truck. He draws a gun on me as well.
“We’re not soldiers. We’re gamekeepers. And you’re the game.”
I closed my eyes. I put my hands up and surrendered.
I heard bullets fly right at me but I didn’t feel a thing. I expected that when a person died like that, they didn’t feel the pain. I thought a guardian angel or someone swooped in at the right moment and separated your soul from your body before the pain hit.
I heard that sometimes when a patient got an organ transplant, like a heart, whatever that the person was last feeling was still inside. Then the new person with the heart would wake up feeling hungry or angry or whatever. Hopefully, these three corpses would rot before anything could be donated. But I didn’t really know how that stuff worked, I think one needed to be brain dead.
But at least they’re dead.
And hopefully, I wouldn’t find out what happened when I died for a long time.
~~~
When I first arrived with Pablo, one thing was absolutely clear. The Underground was not at all underground. It was right out in the open.
Pablo was the fourth soldier. Well, he was a “gamekeeper” turned spy. He wasn’t aiming the gun at me, he aimed it at the other gamekeepers. And they all fell down, one by one.
Most of the members lived in a revived downtown Edina. There’s even a few stores here that actually have a constant stream of customers. There's a pet store, a bakery, a movie theater, some boutiques, pharmacy, a grocery store, and a coffee shop.
I liked the fact that I lived upstairs above and to the left of the old movie theater. They didn’t change the movies that often but I didn’t mind watching most of them over and over again.
Sometimes I pretended that I was in a movie. The lights turned dark and I was in another world. Movies were easier than books to escape into, which kind of scared me. Sometimes I forgot I was even in the theater until the lights went up. Movies were nice but mind-numbing. I was going to take a class on literature soon. Maybe I’d become a better reader.
I lived in a very small apartment. But it was nice. Nice and plain. I had a roommate and her name was Elizabeth. She didn’t smell and we both had our own beds.
In exchange for rent, I worked in the garden and other odd jobs the community director hadlined up for me. Sometimes I was pulling bugs out of the produce or at times I was cashiering for the bakery. I made a little money from it.
The community director happened to be the pastor who gave me keys to the car at my never-happened wedding.
I liked talking to him. I asked him if John has passed through here yet. They had a database of names of everyone they have taken in. It was only a page long though. And it was in a special code I didn’t understand. He wasn’t on the list. In fact, there were no guys listed on the list. Just girls, around my age.
My watch was ticking again. I didn’t know when it exactly started because I just wore it as a bracelet now. Out in the open. When I was just walking around, some guy asked me for the time. Without thinking, I looked to my wrist and my watch was ticking again. The wrong time, of course, but it was working again. That had to mean that John was close by. Or, if not close by, then it must mean that I would see him again soon.
Almost all the money made went back into the community. As well as securing enough gas to get people to Canada. We could only travel by compact car. Buses would be way too obvious. They had to buy a new car every time so no trails led back to those who were waiting.
They warned me not to fill out any resubmission forms but I hadn’t heard of those. Resubmission forms were a way of asking the government to be let back into society. But the real purpose, so some people warn, was to track illegal citizens.
There was a waiting list for Cars to Canada and I was way at the bottom. But I could wait. I’d just live on the fringe of society in my little mouse hol
e and just be patient.
I also helped in the garden. It was really small and it needed constant work. I stupidly picked some tomatoes before they were ripened and it tasted awful. Not that I liked tomatoes much. The sight of ketchup still made me queasy. I could go a long time before putting ketchup on a burger or a hot dog again.
It was one day, just less than a week ago, that I was pulling out the biggest thorny weed I had ever seen in my life, that I noticed this couple looking at a small collection of potted flowers.
I was wondering to myself why people buy flowers knowing that they’re just going to die. Sit on the table and look pretty. Leave it in the ground and let it live a little longer. Stay in one place and not cause any trouble. There would be no wars if people did that. No death. Just stay in a little hole. But I suppose there wouldn’t be much life, if people just sat around all the time. I wouldn’t have met John.
I lingered a moment longer to gawk at the man’s hairy hand.
“Pearl!” it took me a moment to register the face.
“Boring Old Jim!”
He hugged me for the longest time. The man standing next to him nudged for an introduction. “This is the Todd I mentioned to you.”
“I remember.”
Todd grabbed and shook my hand. “Pearl, huh? Pretty name. Did you know, years and years ago, one would have to go through a ton of pearls just to find even a handful of good ones?”
“So why bother?”
“Have you ever seen one close up?”
“No.”
“If you did, then you would know.”
We talked for a little bit longer but then they had to go work a shift at the bakery. They helped make enough bread and even cakes for everyone who wanted them.
Elizabeth, my roommate, sold her spoon rings, purses, and skirts at the street market each Saturday. She somehow twisted spoons into rings, she was going to show me one day. Right now, I was working on making a skirt made out of these pieces of cloth called handkerchiefs. Someone told me handkerchiefs were once used years ago to blow noses. Gross. I washed them all twice. I’ve had worse bodily fluids on me than people’s dried-up snot.
There was a ton of artists at the street market, it was overwhelming. I never really took the time to think about how stuff gets made. I assumed everything was made from machines pouring plastic or metal into a mold and then popped out.
Elizabeth was a little bit older than me. Her main goal of getting out of the States was to go to college. She asked me if I planned on going to college and I lied. Said I had plans. Honestly, I’d never thought too far ahead.
Unless it was about John. Then I could think forever ahead.
Down the block, there was an office building that had been remodeled into a sort of layered strip mall. Lots of cute little stores were selling the most random things. I usually didn’t buy much but I went there all the time. I liked the people there. They were a bunch of interesting characters.
There was finally a place where I liked the people. They smiled real smiles. Not fake smiles because it was scripted, like that wedding planner lady. The people here were fairly happy.
Elizabeth worked in a thrift store that I enjoyed browsing. Lots of people there today. I helped Barty pick up teacups and old china plates that he was going to smash later. He made awesome jewelry with it. I didn’t know how he made it, he refused to tell me his secrets. As long as he refused to tell me, I would have to continue to buy it.
I think I owned more rings than I have fingers now (and most people here still had all ten fingers like I do). Imagine that. Maybe one day I would own enough clothes to wear something entirely different for an entire week.
I picked up a blue and white plate with old-fashioned English people on it. I pointed to a little girl on it and told Barty to make me a necklace out of it.
Elizabeth wasn’t working today but she was browsing through magazines, looking for anything old. She was my age but somehow she said she felt like she was supposed to be born in another decade. Anything dated 1979 and earlier she bought. She wasn’t having much luck today but she still made it a habit to look frequently. She cursed every customer that came to her working with something that she wanted, like a Rolling Stone magazine.
I found a shirt with a dolphin on it. From the amusement park. Elizabeth made fun of me for buying something so boring and dorky but I went along with it. I tried not to show any emotion. I only told her that I needed some sleeping clothes and it was the cheapest thing. She had these clothes, she called them “Pjs”, and they were the softest things I ever felt. I wanted to feel like I was asleep on a cloud too, I told her. She laughed. Maybe I wanted the “pjs” to feel closer to John at night. She would have probably understood why I needed it if I told her but why bother. Didn’t need to bring up the past.
Elizabeth didn’t find anything for herself but she still stood in line to talk to me.
An alarm went off right above my head as soon as the cashier handed the customer in front of me his change. It was loud as hell. Everyone seemed to collectively shrug and head to the door. I put the shirt I was going to buy on the counter, the other customers behind me followed my lead.
No one was panicking. I guessed we all figured something must have accidentally set off the alarm or maybe there was too much smoke in one of the restaurants that just opened up downstairs.
As we exited, walked into the hallway and down the stairs, we could hear a fire truck siren in the distance. “Damn, they’re quick,” Elizabeth laughed.
I saw the red truck and the firemen climbing down the ladder. But they weren’t wearing their protective gear. Maybe they put it on when they got to a more serious fire? Hopefully whatever was burning wasn’t scorched too badly.
“Our heroes came to rescue us,” Elizabeth laughed again.
And then the people ahead of us fell down like paper dolls. Just like those paper dolls that I made for Ricky, where you could see the guts inside of them.
Then Elizabeth was one of them. She fell and took me down with her.
I tried to tell myself that they were just paper dolls smothered in ketchup. But I wasn’t that good of a liar to convince myself of that.
I fainted right after that, I think. Or knocked my head on something and blacked out. Good thing I was down on the floor already.
Sometimes I pretended that I was in a movie. The lights turned dark and I was in another world.
CAMP Z (John)
I had been living in a tree for five days. My feet had not touched the ground in a solid twenty-four hours.
I also hadn’t seen a human in four days. I hadn’t heard screaming in three. And that concerned me considering that there were at least a couple dozen of us at the starting line.
I saw some human bones in some horse or elephant shit or some other type of shit. Maybe even bull shit. I couldn’t tell you which specific bones they were though. Pearl could. While I'm not as morbid as Pearl when it came to that stuff, I’d seen enough dead people to know that those bones were, indeed, human.
They gave us a two-hour head start. Most of them took off running as far as they could in a frenzied state. But it didn’t matter how far or how fast you ran. It mattered how well you hid.
And that is why I was in a tree right now.
I might have made fun of the creature from the amusement park enough to reserve a spot for myself in hell but she did have one great idea.
Hide high. Some people found it easier to dig a hole and stay. Certainly, staying in one place and not moving an inch wouldn’t have caused any wars. Wouldn’t have done anything at all.
Not that it was up to me.
But I did have hundreds of trees to jump to and fro, five big rocks in my pockets (there’s more I wedged into the crooks of trees) and one rainfall. I collected and drank water from the leaves. I felt like a fuckin’ fairy, like Puck or something, but it kept me alive.
Poachers couldn’t see me because they were too stupid to look up high.
T
hey came around once every hour or two. On their stupid golf carts.
It wasn’t the big animals that have caused the most trouble, it’s been the smaller ones. Such as the snow monkeys. They’re smart. Smart little bastards.
Last time I was here, I climbed up a tree because running in any direction will only lead to another animal. Some animals stopped by, sniffed out the area because they smelled meat, but were too dumb to realize that I’m up in a tree.
Except the snow monkeys.
They were the most dangerous when they were hungry, the thieves. They’d punch you in the stomach, rip it open, and take the food right out of you, if they had their way.
Animals ate their own vomit and crap, you know. They didn’t care.
I’d been keeping a stash of berries known to be poisonous to humans; hopefully they were poisonous to primates as well. After all, it was just a two percent or so difference between man and ape. I’m counting and praying on that two percent.
And there was about a fifty-seven percent difference between man and soldier so they didn’t actually find me and Pearl until we came down from the roller coaster.
But the monkeys, man, the monkeys knew. They knew I was here but for the most part but they would leave me alone when they were hungry.
But they needed to stay a little bit hungry for me because hunger was the strongest need out here. It was hard to focus on anything except that, I know. If they focused on just their hunger alone, then other needs of theirs wouldn’t need to get fulfilled. I’m talking about being passed around like a rag doll in a back alley, in a gang bang sort of way. I don’t think I need to make that any clearer.
Some people from last time made that mistake. They thought if they kept the animals, especially the snow monkeys, well fed and satisfied, then they would leave them alone.
Wrong. So very wrong.
That’s what the rocks are for. Knock them on their heads if I had to. Also, drop rocks on any unsuspecting poachers if they ever dared to walk through these woods.
I wished I could see the stars. Maybe if they poked a hole through the smog, I could see it. With the huge holes in the ozone layers, you ought to see the stars better. But maybe it doesn’t work like that.
The War Game Page 13