Sherwood Nation

by Parzybok, Benjamin;

  His hand closed over the doorknob. He heard someone upstairs, in the private lair of his family, and it irked him horribly to think of a man up there where his boys had grown up.

  He sighed heavily, and climbed slowly to the top of the stairs. The glow of the man’s light came from one of the rooms down the hall. “Robert, we need your help!” Gregor shouted down the hallway.

  “There is no Robert,” came the voice finally from Jamal’s room.

  Gregor leaned against the wall of the hallway and felt the wallpaper on his cheek in the dark. It was paisley, purple the dominant color, and he’d hated it since the moment his wife had installed it in 1994, a few years past a brief cultural foray into the design. He’d half-heartedly meant to update it. He’d gone through several purges of her stuff, conflicted over losing another physical manifestation of her, and yet wishing the items would decease in the haunting of him. But mostly, wallpaper was a hard thing to get around to.

  “OK,” Gregor said, “Billy, Danny, Jimmy, Whitey on the moon, I killed your buddy and now I’ve got nothing left to do. I don’t care if you kill me or not, which leaves you, presumably, at a disadvantage, am I right?”

  There was no answer, and on a whim Gregor licked the wallpaper, wishing for one last taste of his wife, her mouth, the salt of her, the way she tasted after a bath, but instead it was an aged, dried glue taste and he wished he’d refrained.

  “I’ve got to go now, Robert. If I let you live you have to clean up the body. That’s the deal. That’s all I ask. I used to have a housekeeper, you know. Though she wasn’t, you know, this committed. Can I get a confirmation?”

  “Oh and hey,” he said, “who’s got the keys anyway?” The troublesome details of logistics. He was too tired to wait around for the young to make up their minds. “Are you in there pissing yourself or what?” He could do this. Just walk away, he told himself. Leave him here in the inside, in Jamal’s room. He turned and walked toward the stairs. He didn’t hear so much as feel someone enter the hallway behind him and Gregor reached his arm back behind him and fired, and the hallway went dark. It was no surprise to see he’d sent a bullet through this one’s headlamp too. He had a highly developed spatial sense. The spatial sense had made him an accidental predator, in a time of guns, and only upon being thrust into it did his predator’s mind finally form.

  Gregor stepped over the dead soldier and went into Jamal’s room and for a moment, breathing in the smell of his boy, he felt such an acute pain of loss that he stood thinking he’d wait them all out here, make his last stand where he stood. Stupid fuck-up, he thought, stupid party-going, idealistic sonofabitch. He slammed the butt of his gun into the wall, and put a two-inch-deep gouge in the plaster and paisley wallpaper.

  He slid the barrel of his own pistol to his temple to try out the feel of it and after a while slowly removed it. He was always the last man standing, it was who he was. Too late to change that now.

  He took a deep, last breath from his house, bullet smell and memory, and set out. He grabbed his pack from the kitchen and pondered where to go next. This house he could not stay in, full of the dead as it was. With his pack slung over his shoulder he paused at the front door, wondering if he wouldn’t be better off with the fat bear escape over the back fence as he’d intended. But the bear had cleared out its prey, so he opened the front door and stepped through. A hot poker of pain stabbed through his leg. From behind a jeep, a man was shooting crazy at him, bouncing bullets off the side of the house.

  “Shit!” Gregor said, gritting his teeth. He shot and then teetered over, unable to stand on his leg. There were people out on the street now, watching from their houses, friends and enemies. On the floor of the porch he held his leg and tried to get control of himself. He ratcheted himself up on one arm and then managed to come to a stand. The pain welled up an intense nausea in him. Grabbing the railing, he levered the top part of himself over the side of the porch and threw up. The wound was just above the knee and too much of a mess to know what was going on in there.

  “Go home,” he yelled. He didn’t want to have to explain to any of these neighbors. Many would be happy to see him like this. He didn’t want to tell them Sherwood was gone. He hobbled toward the stairs and lost control and tumbled down the two steps coming to a stop with his shoulder against the pavement. He fought to keep the blankness from veiling over his eyes, consciousness a feeble flame here amidst the pain. “Oh no,” he said.

  And then his neighbor from down the block, Maureen, stood over him. “Come on,” she said urgently. She cupped his hand in hers and began to pull. “Hurry.”

  Gregor tried to say her name. They’d slept together twenty-five years ago and been found out. There had been few words in the intervening years for the brouhaha it had caused.

  “I always knew this would happen to you, old man,” she said.

  “Maureen,” he said finally and pointed to the jeep.

  “All right,” she said.

  They managed to get him standing. He could feel the blood in his shoe and he felt his stomach going all weak on him again. “Hold on,” he said, and with his hand on her shoulder, leaned over and waited to throw up again. When the feeling passed, he put his arm around her and hopped on the good leg, groaning, to the car.

  At the jeep they paused. People hemmed in in the dark, curious neighbors and phantoms, ghosts of his past, people he’d drunk cocktails with, parents of children he’d commandeered at Sherwood, or those of children whose deaths he’d somehow had a part in. He could feel their presence. On the ground there was a dead city policeman, a black man. For a brief moment he wondered if he knew the man and then realized this was not the time for such memories. All the others had been Guardsmen.

  He leaned against the jeep and Maureen said, “Well.”

  He understood her meaning. “I can drive,” he said.

  “You always did overestimate yourself.”

  Gregor wondered if the far reaches of Sherwood might still be operational. There was a clinic on 9th off Fremont. Or would they be expecting him there?

  She sat him in the passenger seat and hurried around to the driver’s side. They were both getting old, he thought, as he watched the way she got in, this type of hurry unnatural to her.

  “You don’t want to do this,” he said.

  “Yes I do. I know what you’ve been doing. I’m proud of you, Gregor. Besides, it’s no different than caring for my grandchildren.”

  “Grandchildren?” He felt dizzy for a moment. “See. That’s exactly why you don’t want to get messed up in this.”

  “I’m driving you to the clinic. Don’t you go being crazy.”

  Gregor smiled and closed his eyes and leaned his head back on the headrest. They pulled away from the curb and the dark mass of interested parties parted briefly to let them through.

  “How are you, Maureen?” he managed after a while.

  “Good, you?”

  “Oh,” he said, the sound of anguish erupted from him unexpectedly and then cut off. Never ask a question you don’t want to answer yourself, he thought. He was setting his own goddamn traps.

  He told her about the fate of Sherwood. She drove with the lights off, trolling cautiously along the streets, straining through her bifocal glasses to see what lay in the street in front of her and wary of the light of any other vehicle.

  They drove in silence then, only speaking to point out objects in the road or to listen for the sound of gunfire and vehicles.

  The clinic didn’t know Sherwood was gone and Gregor did not bring it up. He did not explain the leg either. He was the general, he’d been in a gunfight. It was plausible enough and no more questions were asked. The clinic was in the home of a nurse, a high-ceilinged, early 1900s craftsman that had been cared for well.

  The nurse made preparations for him to stay the night and he refused. She insisted, pointing out the seriousness of the wound. It sounded so good, to surrender into a bed, let the feeble painkillers gnaw away at the pain, wake
up in a different country. As it was, at any moment he expected the National Guard to rap on the door. The bullet had gone through the flesh of his thigh and grazed the bone and then exited. He was lucky, she’d said, and he told her he was pretty sure there was no one less lucky. The luck was in all the wrong places.

  She stitched him up and instructed him to keep the leg elevated and not to walk on it. He took a massive dose of ibuprofen and clenched his jaws.

  The clinic had a single crutch and he took it, doing an awkward hobble and complaining act back to the jeep.

  “You should go home now,” he told Maureen, who waited for him.

  “You could sleep at my place,” she said.

  “Where would we park the jeep? It’s too close. I can’t go near there.”

  She nodded. “I’ll drop you near, then go park the jeep far away.”

  “All right.”

  He studied her face as she drove and knew that he had to let her go the first chance he could. It had been an unexpected kindness, and the way to repay that kindness would be to disassociate from her as quickly as possible. “You got somebody at home?”

  “You don’t know? My husband died in a car crash a few years back, at the beginning of the drought.”

  He nodded and said he was sorry and wished he’d stop asking questions. They drove in silence until they came close enough to her house to see the area bathed in the light of vehicles, a swarm of soldiers’ silhouettes moving about in that light.

  “We can’t go back,” she said.

  Gregor swore and she turned down a side street. They drove looking for a safe driveway to pull into. In the end they pulled the jeep behind the dumpster space at the abandoned Safeway. Maureen fiddled with closing the top of the jeep. At least they would have shelter for the night.

  “Thank you. I don’t really know why you’re doing this.”

  She shrugged and then hummed a few bars of Sherwood’s anthem.

  “Really?” he said. “No.”

  “No, not really.”

  Gregor picked up his hurt leg and propped it against the dashboard and gritted his teeth.

  “Actually, yes.”

  “What?”

  “Actually, yes,” she said. “Everyone knew, or at least feared, it’d end some day. But I am doing it for Sherwood. I wish it had lasted.”

  Gregor nodded.

  “You think there’s any chance?” she said.

  “No,” he said quietly.

  “Painkillers work?” she said.

  He said he wasn’t sure, meaning no, it was all he could do to talk through it. “We’re going to need to sleep close to stay warm,” he said.

  “I’ve heard that before.” She moved in close. He slouched in the seat to keep his leg elevated and she rested against his shoulder. “It’ll be dawn soon,” she said. “You rest.”

  Deep in the night Martin went and stood next to their captive’s bed. He heard the booming of conflict outside and knew what it meant. Their Ranger would not forgive him now, she would never be family.

  During the day they let her walk about the house, though they’d barred the exits. At night they still tied her to the bed. Her hands were splayed out and her feet roped down; she was sound asleep. He felt sick at himself.

  He retrieved a knife from the kitchen and cut her bonds. She woke and in the dim light he could see her frightened expression.

  “Something’s happened,” he said. He nodded toward the outside. As he did, a burst of gunfire could be heard some distance away. “You can go if you want. Or stay. Whatever.” He realized he hadn’t put down the knife yet. He gripped the blade and handed it to her, handle first. She took it warily. “Something’s wrong out there.”

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I doubt squealing on us is going to mean much now.” Outside it sounded like a mass of trucks were rolling down Fremont, the busy street at the end of the block.

  She got off the bed and walked to the front door and he followed behind. On the way he fetched the hammer from underneath his bed and pried the two-by-four off the front door.

  “I don’t have anything but Ranger clothes.”

  “I’ll find something.” He went and rummaged through Celestina’s dead husband’s clothes and came up with slacks and a white button down shirt. The man had worn no casual clothes. He found their captive on the front porch listening.

  “You got people out there?” he said.

  “Just friends, Rangers. Friends who are Rangers.”

  He wondered if they’d be dead by now, and if she had a sense of that or if he ought to tell her.

  She dressed there on the front porch, shuffling into the slacks and shirt in a rush. Everything was slightly too large.

  “Should have found you something dark.” He took off his suit jacket and placed it over her shoulders. “There.”

  She struggled with keeping her pants up, so he removed his belt too and handed it to her and she cinched it around her waist. “You be careful out there,” he said, awkward at this. “Come back here if you need to.”

  She scowled at him. “You’re fucking crazy, do you know that? Something’s wrong with you.”

  He shrugged.

  “Tell Celestina good-bye.” He watched her head out into the night, creeping along the front yards and staying off the street. When the dark enveloped her, his one eye stayed fixed on that space, listening to the fighting. A few people ran by, fugitives, he assumed. Trying the doors of houses, their breathing fast and scared.

  After a while he went inside and nailed the two-by-four back over the door. Someone else had taken his revenge, after his own desire for revenge had melted away to more or less nothing, and he didn’t know what to think about it.

  He woke to a pounding at the front door. Looking out, he was amazed to see their captive was back. When he got the door open, she entered with her head bowed. She’d been crying—he didn’t so much hear it as sense it. He pulled her to him briefly and said, there, OK.

  Then he guided her through the house and she did not protest, went willingly to whatever fate he moved her toward. He steered her to Celestina’s room. The old woman was awake; he could see the dark wells of her eyes in the room.

  “Trust me,” he said. “This is what you need. Por favor, Cele, Sherwood se murió.” Without asking further Martin guided their captive into Celestina’s bed, and she complied meekly.

  Celestina folded the covers over their Ranger and put her hand on her arm. “Shh, duerma,” Celestina said. Sleep now.

  Martin went through the house then, testing locks and nailing boards back in place. There were the three of them. He had charges to protect. This was all he cared about now, he realized. He tucked his screwdrivers under the couch with the hammer, at the ready. He felt weirdly content, for the first time in a long time.

  Zach and Renee sat in bed and stared into the utter dark of the tunnel and talked about what to do next.

  They had gone through several cycles of sleeping and despair. Zach had tried to ply his brain for ideas, but nothing came. He felt stuffed full of sawdust. At each open of his mouth, all that came out was banality.

  This was the end, he thought. The idea that they would live out the week—or even, would want to live out the week—felt unlikely. This was the time for madness, for doing that which was always held in check by the threat of consequences—by civilization. It was a dark but freeing feeling, though he had no idea how he might manifest this madness. Mostly, he wanted to go home.

  They felt their way along the tunnel to the dim basement, and then across to the stairs. It was a treacherous and slow walk, full of shin bruisings and strange obstacles at head-height that they could not guess the nature of.

  Up the stairs they listened to the basement door. There was a chaos of small feet on the other side. Of clonking and yelling and running. From the basement windows they could see that it was light out.

  “Suppose it’s close to broadcast? We slept through a da
y and a night?”

  “No idea.”

  “Do we knock or?” Zach said.

  “He’s your boss.”

  Zach cleared his throat and tentatively knocked at a volume that would certainly be lost in whatever stampede was going on on the other side of the door. “He’s not my boss,” he said.

  “OK, Zach,” Renee said, “good work.” She pushed him aside and opened the door. It was past dawn outside; the power would be on momentarily.

  “Hello?” Renee called.

  Nevel appeared at the door, dressed now, his hair indicating he’d slept with his head wedged in a vise, a gun tucked into his belt.

  “What’s going on?” Renee said. “Can we come up?”

  “Sure. Fuck if I know. People are running helter-skelter in the streets. There’s been gunfire. There were no water deliveries yesterday, and we decided not to go to distribution. News is on shortly.”

  Cora came and stood next to Nevel and her kids stood next to her, Luisa wrapping an arm around her leg. The whole family inspected them, their visitors from the basement. “Let them up, Nev.”

  “Thank you,” Renee said, and felt sickened and grateful this family would take her in. “We won’t stay here long.”

  Cora waved her hand. “I don’t care any more,” she said and they could see she was miserable and had been weeping. Her kids hovered close.

  In the living room they waited.