Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America

by Brian Francis Slattery

  “Don’t pull it out. It’s me.”

  The lights are restored, and the assassin is standing next to her. He lets go of her hand.

  “Ms. Winderhoek,” he says.

  “Very suave.”

  “Suave is for soap and Casanovas, Ms. Winderhoek.”

  “I assume you have a reason for coming here.”

  “Oh yes. I’m here to tell you that you are speaking to a dead man. See?” He shows her the severe puncture wounds in his side, the wet glint of muscle, a hint of organ, no longer bleeding.

  “Did it hurt?” she says.

  He shrugs. “Not as much as other things I’ve lived through. Some professional courtesy on Marco’s part, I think.”

  “How many did you kill before he killed you?”

  “Of the Slick Six? Zero. Incidental to the mission? Six … ah, Miss Winderhoek, don’t feign offense. We know that the market determines the price of a man now.”

  “Where did it happen?”

  “Outside of Watsonville, on the beach. Three of the Slick Six had gone there, to the farms of Myra Jong—”

  “I’m familiar with her operation,” Jeannette Winderhoek says.

  “I know,” the assassin says. “I know, in fact, that you’ve seen the fields yourself. I also understand now that the Aardvark is part owner of two of the Slick Six.”

  “The most harmless ones, as they proved when they sold themselves into slavery.”

  The assassin smiles. “But now the others have joined them, and I think that Marco Oliveira is planning a catastrophe. Beyond mere crime, perhaps.”

  “Do you think he could do it?”

  “Why couldn’t he?”

  “Where are you going with this?”

  “Being dead,” the assassin says, “has forced me to take a long view of things. You were wrong to say that the Slick Six could no longer threaten the Aardvark. They can, and they will. But they only can because the Aardvark himself has made it so. He did not have to jail Zeke. He did not have to buy Hideo and Carolyn. And he did not have to send me after them.”

  “But that would be admitting defeat, and you know he doesn’t admit to anything.”

  “I know. But I am not sure you see the way he has allowed history to double back on itself. The circles are spinning again, the forms of the past returning to us.”

  “You’re not making any sense at all.”

  “I’m just saying that if he had not done these things, the war would have been over years ago.”

  “This is a war now?”

  “It might be.”

  “Does that make you its first casualty?”

  “Maybe. My ribbon is cut.”

  Outside Bakersfield, the lights along the highway vanished, and there was only the splash of road fleeing the headlights, the eyes of stray animals blinking from ditches, branches from orange groves creeping toward the road. Nomads lived within them now, the assassin had heard, trolling the thousands of acres on foot in small caravans, catching rain in funnels tied to their heads. When two groups found each other amid the trees, there was violence, a skirmish over bread and fresh water, a corpse among falling fruit. The assassin ran across one group who dragged trees across the road to make him stop; after he killed them, he piled their bodies in a ditch and set the blockade on fire. He marveled at how Dayneesha’s trail merged almost to perfection with Zeke and Marco’s. Were his vision less acute, he might have thought that they were all in a convertible together, the boys in front with their arms hanging out of the windows, Dayneesha sitting behind the driver, head back, staring up into the night sky, a stash of weapons snug by her side. Three teenagers joyriding. But the Last True Chief’s training had been too good, and the assassin could tell they’d left her behind in Texas, didn’t even know she was following them.

  He passed through Watsonville, took the road to the coast through the land patched with strawberry fields, past the tents of the slave camp, the flashlights on the guards’ rifles throwing quivering beams into the mist at the end of the night; then the road angled through a field cut into lots ready for development— houses clinging to the ground in four of them, the rest wavering with weeds—and finally broke free and turned toward the shore. The salt air enveloped him, thickened his hair, and he settled into a calm. It wasn’t just the nearness of his prey; it was the sea itself. For the assassin, it was almost religious, as if the waves carried a secret about the truth of the world that they told every time they broke, and though we couldn’t understand what they said, when the ocean pulled us under and we swallowed it, breathed it into our lungs, we took in some of its meaning.

  He found Marco, Zeke, and Dayneesha on the beach arounda withering fire, huddled together under a single blanket. The motorcycle that Dayneesha had stolen lay on its side, sand scouring the shine off the chrome. Dayneesha and Zeke were facing the coals, and their sleep was deep and obvious. Were Marco not there, the assassin could have killed the other two from where he stood, twenty yards away. With two knives, it would have been easy. If he changed his position, he might have been able to do it with just one, though that would be showing off, an unnecessary display of ego. And there was Marco to consider. His face was toward the assassin, his eyes closed, his mouth a little open, showing the tips of his teeth. It was an uncanny mimicry of sleep. But as the assassin got closer he could tell that Marco wasn’t sleeping, for the Vibe was not right.

  “How long have you been waiting for me?” the assassin whispered.

  “It’s okay to talk,” Marco said, without moving or opening his eyes. “They won’t wake up.”

  “Fine,” the assassin said. “How long?”

  “Two hours and thirty-nine minutes. Forty … seven seconds.”

  “Your legs must be cramped. A little sluggish.”

  “Before you move, I have something to tell you,” said Marco. “I know your work.”

  “I know you too. From the Tunis job. Excellent work.”

  “Thank you.”

  “No, thank you. I learned a lot studying that job.”

  “As long as we’re talking trade, what was it like training with the Last True Chief of the Shona?”

  “It was hard,” the assassin said. “Much more haphazard than I expected it to be. He kept making me drink this horrible alcohol all the time. He said it was the key to the training. I think he might have just been lonely.”

  “It wasn’t like training with Ravi Gupta or Bai Dao. That was all discipline.”

  “Exactly,” the assassin said.

  “Even the Yanomami. That was discipline too. The chest-pounding duel. The scars on the head. Making curare.”

  “It’s still the best poison I know of for arrowheads.”

  “Yes,” Marco said. “But this skill you picked up from the Last Chief was worth the lack of discipline. It makes you much more efficient than I ever was. Some of your work is famous within the assassin community because of it, though I’m sure you know that. I have immense respect for your methods and the skill with which you perform them.”

  “The feeling is mutual,” the assassin said. “Why didn’t we ever work together?”

  “I was always a little intimidated by you.”

  “Don’t belittle yourself. I could never have done what you did with the kind of … flair you showed.”

  “Which is why,” Marco said, “I hope you take what I am about to say as a sign of utmost respect.”

  “Of course.”

  “That when we start fighting, it will take me a little over six seconds to kill you.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “You’ll have to attack me first,” Marco said.

  “Not true,” the assassin said. “I could kill one of the others first.”

  “Don’t fuck with me. We both know how stupid that is.”

  “…”

  “So your first move is toward me,” Marco said. “If it’s coming straight in, then I lead with the Diamond Kick.”

  “And I counter with the Golden
Scissors.”

  “Which opens the way for the Necronomist’s Claw. You lose,” Marco said.

  “Perhaps. Let’s fight it out.”

  “Not yet. Because your actual attack will be aerial.”

  “…”

  “Won’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “The Soaring Raptor, which you learned from Red Kwon, my mentor, only three months before he died. He gave it to you and to no other, because you were his favorite student. To my knowledge, you’ve used it four times, each one lethal. The Soaring Raptor made you what you are today. I was so jealous that Red Kwon had favored you that I challenged him to a duel. I swore I would kill him. You can imagine his response.”

  “Yes.”

  “I recovered. But I’ve been studying. I visited the places where you used it. I followed the path you must have taken with my eyes. I even visited your victims before they were put in the ground. And I know how to beat it.”

  “How’s that?”

  “It’s much simpler than you think. An old Xhosa trick.”

  “With an assegai?” the assassin said.

  “That’s right.”

  “But you don’t have an assegai.”

  “Of course I do.” He shifts to his left and there it is, the wooden shaft, the dark blade drawing a line of light in the sand. “I know what you’re going to say—it’s more like an iklwa than a standard assegai. But the trick is the same either way. I knew that if the Aardvark were to send anyone after us, it would be you. Because you’re the best in the world, and nobody’s ever beaten you. So I prepared. You could say I’ve been preparing for five years, because I thought you’d come for me on the ship.”

  “You smuggled an assegai into prison?”

  “It wasn’t easy. Then I thought you’d come for me in New York. I was wrong about the timing of it. But I knew you were coming. And I knew you’d never studied with the Xhosa.”

  “The Last True Chief of the Shona always said I should have,” the assassin said. “He said they were motherfuckers.”

  “He was right.”

  “…”

  “So, do we need to play this out?” Marco said.

  “We might as well.”

  “Good.”

  “It is good,” the assassin said, and smiled.

  “I am sorry we never worked together. I would have liked that,” Marco said.

  “The Aardvark told me he always liked working with you best,” the assassin said. “Said you broke his heart when you took up with these people. I understand why.”

  “…”

  “Well. Should we do this?”

  “Let’s,” Marco said.

  After the assassin died on the sand, he walked back up the long stairs in the dune until he reached the top, then turned and looked over the morning light angling into the Pacific, the waves heaving in from Hawaii, sons and daughters of distant tremors and the tug of the moon. His killing days rose from him, a flock of greasy birds that flapped and wheeled over the water, and he waved good-bye, let them fall away. The assassin was dead and at the gate, and he wanted to laugh, or cry, but he was too tired for either.

  In her booth at the diner in Watsonville, the skin along Myra Jong’s left arm tingles, as though a heart attack is brewing; it’s the Vibe moving through her, alerting her to her part in a grand design, though the Vibe is prickly and won’t tell her what it is. She becomes suspicious; her hands pull bullets out of her pocket, load her pistol, though there’s nobody sitting across from her to shoot. In the last few days, her slaves seem to have become quiet. She doesn’t have complete evidence of this; they still shout to one another in the fields, talk at meals. The usual level of mild insubordination, someone’s head against a rifle. It’s in their manner, their movements. They have become inscrutable to her, a cloudy sky concealing the invading spaceships above.

  She keeps calling for news from the foreman, sends an agent into the camp masquerading as a slave, a trick shelearned from another owner up north who’d ferreted out a would-be revolt leader, cut off his head, and hung it from a pole over the fields. But her agent has nothing to say. Nobody will talk to him, as though they know he’s a spy, or it’s too late to involve anyone else in their plans.

  “Do you think there’s something going on?” she says.

  “Most definitely,” the agent says.

  “What?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Weeks pass. The weather cools, grows foggy. Crops wane. One of the broken-down Victorian homes outside the town falls victim to a fire; master and slaves stand together in the fields to watch the walls lean in, the roof lift off from the heat. Then it all collapses in a sigh of thick smoke. The slaves are getting quieter and quieter. Her agent still has no information, and now he’s cagey, as though he’s been threatened.

  “What’s going on with you?” she says.

  “Nothing.”

  “You know that if I shot you right here, nobody would care.”

  “I know.”

  She orders more guns from an arms dealer in San Jose. The only ones she can get her hands on are some Type 56s, Chinese copies of Kalashnikovs by way of Burma. A quarter of them rust in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, another eighth are skimmed off in San Jose, disappear into the landscape. She makes a big show of them when they arrive in Watsonville, has her boys unload the crates in front of the slaves, lets them watch while the rifles are given out and a volley of ammunition blows out the windows of a motel, gnaws pieces out of its wooden doors. She wants them to see it all, to understand that if she’s going to be taken, it’ll be in noise and fire. It never occurs to her how quiet it will be.

  She wakes up with Marco’s hand over her mouth. No. Most of his hand is over her mouth, but two fingers have slippedbetween her lips to pinch her tongue, stop the speech in her throat. He has both feet on the bed, crouches over her, his face very close to hers, so that his breath, cool and odorless, plays across her face.

  “You’re wondering where Cesar is,” Marco says.

  She nods.

  “I wanted to give him the same choice I’m giving you, but he woke up before I could immobilize him. He’s in the hallway now. Well, some of him is. If I take my fingers out of your mouth, will you promise not to yell?”

  She nods.

  “To whisper?”

  She nods. His fingers float past her teeth, leave a slight taste of sugar.

  “Two-thirds of your guards are taken care of already,” he says. “Half of them gave in without any fight at all. They could be at the highway by now. The other half I had to kill myself, which, as you can imagine, wasn’t very hard. Though I’m impressed: You inspired a lot of loyalty in your men. The pay must have been good. Or you treated them well.”

  “I did neither,” Myra Jong says. “They were just so desperate for work that they thought they were happy.”

  From the west, the wind from the sea carries a flock of hollers, goaded by machine-gun fire. She can tell already how bad it is for her. Were her men fighting back, there would be long cascades from the guns, a wash of screams, the white noise of charging feet, the sound of a besieged few thinning the ranks of a mob. But it’s all short and sporadic, the report of guards being shot where they stand or fleeing across fields, and the silent slaves sweeping toward the town, tracking her as if they can smell her in her bed.

  “What’s this choice you said you wanted to give to Cesar?” she says.

  “I could get you out of this,” Marco says. “Help you escape.”

  “So I can be your living messenger? No thanks.”

  “I could do you right here, then. Spare you what’s coming.”

  “Oh, you can’t save me from that. They’re animals tonight. Do you think they’ll leave Cesar’s body alone? Now think of what they’ll do to me. No. Let me control this, as much as I can.”

  “I won’t let you hurt any of them,” Marco says.

  “You idiot. I know that.”

  By the time she gets outside, twent
y of her former property have encircled her house. They have shotguns and semiautomatics, the Type 56s she paraded in front of them. Others have farm implements: scythes, shears, sharpened hoes. She looks at her empty hands. She was a teacher once, four battering years in a high school in Chicago; then she sold insurance policies—life, fire, and flood—had a knack for convincing people to take out bigger policies on their lives than they could afford on paper. You’re worth it, she said. When the economy collapsed, she was running a stationery store. The power blinked out; then a trash can crashed through the front window and the sound of the orchestra of chaos tuning up in the street swirled through the darkened room. A dozen thieves were in and out of her store before she could speak. She remembers it like a haiku. Fire outside; it snows paper in here. I try to catch it; it melts.

  The circle of slaves tightens. Two of them have ragged stripes of blood on their clothes already. They smile at her, and she makes a decision. She runs toward them, screaming the worst things she can think of. She is unsurprised when the first wave of bullets passes through her, a fan of hot poison that hits everything inside her; by the time she reaches the man with the scythe, she knows she’s done. The man raises the blade, and she falls to her knees, holds up her head, makes it impossible to miss. On the other end of the scythe, his hands on the swinging handle, Tyrone Fly feels like a magician. The blade passing through the slave owner is the bullet passing through the apple, slow and shattering, the scythe fulfilling adestiny laid out for it by its maker in Kentucky, who crept into the factory by moonlight before the curved metal and the wooden shaft were joined, sprinkled them with whiskey from the still of his dead brother, waved his hands over it: And you shall set them free. For the next few seconds, everything is a wonder of color as Myra Jong folds to the earth. Then the smell hits him, of meat and tangy saltpeter, and Tyrone Fly understands what he has done. Thirty-four years ago, he was a child outside of Phoenix, Arizona, searching for red rocks on a reposed angle of quarry chips, heavy machinery operating above. Then he was a wrestler in Tucson wearing red trunks with yellow zigzags, a mask over his face, his hands on a towering trophy; then a truck driver hauling canned goods into Omaha through a hailstorm that cracked his windshield, thrashed the grass along the side of the road, broke the skulls of animals in their pens. Twice married, twice divorced. The second time, he and his ex-wife met in the Buttercup Motel outside Cincinnati right after the papers were signed, stayed there for three days until the manager called the police on account of the noise. She said she would keep in touch, but he never found her again. If she could see him now.