“Soon we will be over Miami,” Hideo says.
“This thing can fly?” Zeke says.
“Off of Miami,” Hideo says. “You are catching Kari’s condition.”
“I caught it years ago,” Zeke says.
“Yes. Do you remember the job in Miami?”
“Three banks and a Han dynasty sculpture.”
“Yes. Did you know that Kimura still has no idea how we did that? He asked. I would not tell.”
“I assume you came up here to talk about something else.”
“Yes.”
“Well then.”
“…”
“Well, is it about Marco?” Zeke says.
“Yes.”
“Are you going to make me have this conversation by myself?”
“No. Kari is right. There are things that must be said. You and I must say them.”
“I think we said a lot of them five years ago.”
“We were not calm then,” Hideo says. “We are calm now.”
“Then say what you need to say, and be done with it.”
“If we succeed in our plan,” Hideo says, “I believe we should consider it the Slick Six’s last job, our greatest heist yet: stealing an entire island, an entire government. Then, the Slick Six should no longer be.”
“So you’re just using Marco to get your freedom,” Zeke says.
“We did not ask him to free us in Watsonville,” Hideo says.
“That’s the most pathetic thing I have ever heard you say.”
“I am sorry,” Hideo says. “But do you think we should return to our former lives—lives that no longer suit any of us, even you—because we owe him?”
“No. I just don’t quite understand why you don’t want to go back.”
“You can stay with him if you want to,” Hideo says. “It’s your choice.”
“You don’t see this as a betrayal?”
“It does not matter how I see it. I do not want to go back.
Kari and I do not want to go back. We are tired. We just want to go home.”
“That’s all Marco wants too.”
“He has to find another way to get there.”
“I don’t think he knows how,” Zeke says. “You know this might kill him.”
“It will not,” Hideo says. “He survived five years in prison. He is too good a fighter to be undone by this.”
“But he can’t fight this,” Zeke says. “Or you.”
“No. He cannot.”
“…”
“…”
“You’ve both decided, then?” Zeke says. “You and Carolyn? There’s nothing I can say that’ll change your minds?”
Hideo shakes his head.
“Why didn’t you say something sooner?”
“I needed time to think. I have always needed time to think. It does not happen for me right away as it does for you.”
“I know.”
“Please do not judge Kari and I.”
“I never have,” Zeke says. “I’m in no position to do that.”
“None of us are.”
“What will you do instead?” Zeke says.
“We do not know,” Hideo says. “That is what freedom is, is it not?”
The sky over Lindsborg is tinged with green and yellow; the clouds swirl above the town as though time is speeding up. A far-off keen rides in on a low rumble that brings people in from the fields, makes animals lie down in their pens; then it rains in torrents, hard drops that bounce off the bricks and explode into sparks until the street sizzles with liquid electricity. But even through the rain’s rush, the people can hear the roar of motors, the cries of the performers working the machines. The sound continues throughout the night, and they lie in their bedrooms listening, looking out the windows at themoon’s green light. After the rain stops, the refugees from Buhler meet at three in the morning in the main intersection of the town, take a good look at the clay-colored street, the bright paint on the buildings, and head off into the fields to the north. We won’t go through that again, they say.
The next day, the wind sweeps across Lindsborg in a steady gust, rattling siding, sending waves of dust across the windows; and as people lean out and close their shutters, run outside to pull the laundry off the line, they can tell that the noise is getting louder, and something sinks in them. For the last few days they’d been comforting themselves with the idea that maybe the circus would pass them by; if they were just quiet enough, it would mistake Lindsborg for abandoned, go stir the ruins of McPherson instead. But no, someone left a candle in the window at night, someone kept the fire in the fireplace burning too long, and the men clinging to the backs of hippopotami lifted their heads, sniffed the wind, and veered northward. As the horde appears on the edge of the world, topping the hill south of town, the flying machines tottering in the air, the people of Lindsborg can hear the circus start to howl, and the sirens on the old fire stations wail their answer. Shotguns are pulled from walls, pistols from drawers; strings of people run from the outlying houses into the center of town until Main Street is a frantic mob of shouting and crying—some running toward the basement of the school, others seeking the safety of crowds, still others grouping together, counting weapons, horses, ammunition. The mayor organizes them fast, sets up a line of men and lumber in a barricade twenty yards from the stoplight at Main and Lincoln, asks if anyone’s willing to start fighting now. Five men with horses and shotguns volunteer without saying anything, and the mayor sends them galloping out of town.
They break out of the streets and trees in forty-two seconds and are racing across the earth, the circus rearing up before them in a haze of dust and oil. They careen toward it and splitto either side, put lead into trapeze artists and animals, wheel away, are about to return for a second run when forty acrobats spring from the tent at the circus’s heart, roll on the ground, and sprint toward them. Two of the riders see what’s coming and peel off, but the other three are going too fast to change course, so they glide into an amoeba of flesh that overwhelms them in an instant. The two that escaped look over their shoulders and see only a clot of thrashing limbs, drenched red within a second; then the amoeba pulls itself off the six corpses, regroups, and sprints after the horsemen in a rising cry. The two men turn and take down fifteen in the front, but there are just too many of them. And now the horses aren’t taking any more orders; they rear and ditch their riders, leaving the two men on the ground while the mob rushes toward them. The men look at each other, the guns in their hands, then turn and empty the rest of their ammunition into the tide until it pulls them under.
On Main Street, the men behind the barricade hear the blasts from the guns, the screeches of rhinos and elephants, the undulating voices. For one moment, there is a lull in the noise that lets them hope that somehow those five riders turned the circus back; but then they see the smoke rising over the buildings, hear the machines kicking back into motion. The Circus of Industrial Destruction is starting to burn Lindsborg down. It takes only a few minutes for the sky to thicken into a boiling black wall filled with angry fires, and at last the circus emerges from it, churning toward them in a raging wave of metal, hair, and skin. The people behind the barricade start firing into the mass, raise a mist of blood from its ranks, but then a surge of humanity storms from its borders, swells over the barricade, and all discipline is lost in a blast of screams and shouting. For Dayneesha, it’s as if a tornado is coming for her; she stands paralyzed, one hand on a green-painted streetlight, watches the carnage rush toward her, blanches at the stench of offal, sees one man’s stomach opened up by a piece of scrap metal, three more torn apart by lions, their faces a hash of anguish and surprise. Behind it all, she sees the tent looming on the elephants’ backs, bucking and swaying in the smoke. Seven clowns are running toward her now, bodies smeared with gore and trailing tattered cloth, and she has a chance to send out a message to her family, into the ether. Can you hear me? I tried to find you. I really tried.
Then, as i
f by magic, her attackers stumble in unison, clutch their bellies; an arm flies off of one, a head rolls off of another, and as they all tumble to the ground, Marco’s hand is on her shoulder. He nods at her once, as if to remind her—he told her he’d get her out of whatever they got into, didn’t he?— looks into the chaos, cocks his head as if he’s doing math, then leaps, climbs hand over hand to the top of the streetlight, draws two swords, jumps, and turns invisible. For the next few seconds, she can’t see the man or his limbs working, but watches a swerving line of death cut through the horde, men and animals falling away on either side of it. A cry of alarm rises from the attackers: They’re trying to regroup, but it’s way too late for that. Marco continues to wreak havoc across them, streaking through them like a sentient bolt of lightning, jagged and unrelenting, pulling the flying contraptions out of the air, breaking the machines, at last disappearing into the tent; it bulges like a balloon for four seconds before caving in on itself. All at once the circus is in disarray; it comes apart at the seams, and in a collective moan, the pieces slow, their denizens flee, are brought down by gunfire from the rallying townspeople. It’s over fast, the circus dispersing into the fields, shedding its dead and wounded, howling into the horizon. Dayneesha looks at the people in the street, dyed red, hugging their children. There are legs on the sidewalk. A torso draped over a mailbox. Above her, two arms from two different people are hooked at the elbow over the bend of the streetlight. There’s a head under the tire of a rusting yellow wheelbarrow. She can hear the blood draining into the sewers, and looks at her own hands; the palmsare smeared dark red, as though she’s about to leave a print on a white curtain, draw a turkey around it.
To the south, the town is still burning; they’ll lose a third of it before they can get the fires to stop. All around are the wails of townspeople finding their dead, the shamble of feet moving among the corpses. An elephant lies on its side under the stoplight at the intersection of Main and Lincoln, succumbing to sixteen bullet wounds, tusks scraping against the bricks, its lungs rising and falling, a giant bellows filling with water. The mayor and six other people stand around it, talking; then the mayor puts a shotgun in the animal’s mouth and unloads it into its skull. The dead circus performers lie all around them, limbs disjointed, clothes in shreds, the blood soaking the bright colors into red, purple, black. They never got a chance. Once they were farmers, mill workers, truckers. They worked gas stations in the middle of the empty land, stood under a tent of fluorescent light at night and looked out at the dark highway. Nobody ever seemed to stop. They waited tables in a family restaurant with walls still stained from the days of cigarettes, everyone smiling, everyone trying to get along. They drove fifteen miles to get a toothbrush. Their towns were withering away even before the collapse, row after row of boarded-up storefronts and empty brick thoroughfares, the curls of masonry cracking in the cold, falling into the street. A ruin at the end of the sidewalk, the sign for a local opera company from seventy-five years ago painted on the last wall standing, just about bleached away by years of sun and snow. On the gigantic farms, machines dug enormous circles onto the earth, giant spiders moving over the dirt. The horizon spiked with grain mills, power stations, tanks of natural gas. Church steeples. When the collapse came at last, they were at first no worse off, for there were no jobs to lose, no assets to liquidate. Then, when the food stopped getting out to them, they were much worse off, starving in the midst of a thousand miles of rotting grain. By the time Cal found them, they wereready for him; after the jaws of industry and commerce were done with them, they had nothing else.
The people of Lindsborg start moving their bodies to the sidewalk when a gasp gargles from the shell of a chassis nearby, a leg kicks, and four women with guns surround it, ready to shoot. But it’s just a man, tied and bound, twitching and hurt, covered in gashes and scratches, semicircular wounds that one of the women realizes are bites taken out of him by someone else, by many other people. Her face wrinkles, softens, and she bends down and touches him with her free hand, just two fingers on his cheek. He flinches, stifles a shout; then his eyes open, and the woman swears she sees them flood with life.
“Am I in Cincinnati yet?” he says.
“No, honey,” she says. “You’re in Kansas now.”
And just like that, Tyrone Fly’s past spins away from him at last, swinging into the sky over the carnage and mayhem below. His stints as a slave in Eureka and Watsonville, the killing of a woman. The waiting for his ex, always waiting, thinking he would go and find her, she would come and get him, they would meet in a truck stop bathroom, the parking lot of a burned-out mall, a bridge over the Ohio River. It has all been too much, too much for him to bear, and as another woman bends down and wipes his face with the cuff of her sleeve, he lets it all go. And all at once, the gauzy clouds in the atmosphere above him, the panes of glass in the windows around him flowing out of their frames, the stretcher beneath him, carried by dirty, blood-streaked hands, are miracles to him, and he can’t keep from laughing. It starts as a smile that shudders into a chuckle by the time he’s suspended over the street. As they bring him into a furniture store to tend to him, he is guffawing so hard it hurts, but there’s no stopping him now; he laughs for another half an hour, through the pain of the doctor’s ministrations, the worrying of his wounds, until he can’t take another moment of being awake, and he sleeps like he’s a new father, his child slumbering in his arms.
“You saved him,” Dayneesha says to Marco. “You saved them all. Everyone who’s left, they owe you their lives.” They’re at a party in the fields south of town in Marco’s honor; the people of Lindsborg drink until they’re blind, make him an honorary sheriff five times over. Men and women come up to him, try to crush him in their arms. Thank you for protecting my child. If there’s anything you ever need, anything I can do. Marco is already moving beyond them; Dayneesha can tell. He did it to protect her. He did it because he wanted to be good. But Dayneesha’s thinking about those blurry images she saw through security cameras, back when the Slick Six were slick. About Hideo coming back from Johannesburg, how he’d just handed over the information, said nothing about what had happened. About what they’re going to do in New York. They’ll make it look like Main Street after the circus visited, the pieces of human beings, the smell sweet and rotten, rolling over them all. He saved this town, Dayneesha thinks, but that street is where Marco is all the time. He carries a wasteland within him, fallow soil wet with blood. It scares her. The whole thing scares her.
“I’m not going,” she says to Marco in the morning.
“What do you mean?” he says.
“I mean to Salina. I can’t go. You can do it yourself, right?”
“…”
“…”
“Yes,” Marco says. “But what about New York? Are you coming to New York?”
“…”
“We need you. You need to make the calls. Move the information.”
“I can do it from anywhere,” Dayneesha says. “I don’t need to go with you.”
“And what about after New York?”
“…”
A few days later, reports come in from the outskirts of Salina that the Sioux have arrived, so Marco takes the road north, sloping up from the motels and the old antique shop in the metal barn, out again into fields spiked with telephone poles. Dayneesha watches him until he’s gone, hates herself for hoping that he might not come back.
The road into Salina is a four-lane strip lined with auto dealerships, malls, fast food restaurants, Chinese buffets, and their empty parking lots, signs marking the state of commerce at the time of collapse. The movie theater lists titles from five years ago, letters missing. LUNCH SPECIAL $5.99. ZERO DOWN FINANCING. CABLE TV, WEEKLY RATES. PROPANE SOLD HERE. The end of a car angles out of a burnt-out convenience store window, a casualty of the last days of cheap gasoline, when the road was empty and the Salinans ran drag races down its middle. Nothing else left to do. In the left-turn lane, a long row of
horse droppings, gathering flies.
The Sioux on guard approach Marco with caution; they can tell what he is. They escort him to the steps of the Masonic temple on Santa Fe Avenue, a mammoth cube of a building with a Greek portico with six columns. To the left of the stairs stands a statue of a man wearing a fez, leaning on a crutch in his right hand, a child sitting in the nook of his right arm. On the pedestal, the relief of a scimitar, a crescent of horns, a star hanging on a metal chain. It all seems to mean something, but Marco can’t decipher it; it’s just another set of symbols from another age.
Through the metal doors of the temple, in a marbled lobby with a checkered floor, Robert Blackfeather Sherman sits in a red leather wingback chair before a great door. His wife, whose pregnancy swelled from invisible to mammoth in two days, is sitting on a yellow blanket, legs out in front of her at almost a ninety-degree angle. She is prone to bursts of superhuman energy, strength that humans shouldn’t have; last week a horse died midtrot, toppled on its side, pinned its rider—an eleven-year-old boy—beneath it. She flipped the horse off him in a single heave, put the boy on his feet, told him he’d live.
Since they left Wisconsin, Robert Blackfeather Sherman’s dreams have become epic. Two nights ago, on the Kansan plain north of Salina, amid the oceanic breathing of his people and their animals, he dreamed that his tribe had grown to swarm across the country, repopulate its dead cities; they tore down all of the buildings of concrete and plastic and replaced them with spindly towers made from cornstalks and buffalo bones. They were changing all the names, taking down the green metal signs and putting up their own, calling the streets after their ancestors. Crazy Horse Drive. Standing Bear Road. And he stood at the center of the country, not far from where he is now, the beating heart of a proud nation. So he came to Salina expecting great tidings; he isn’t surprised that Marco Oliveira is before him, kneeling on the marble floor—not in homage, but out of protection, because Sherman can tell how lethal he is. Robert Blackfeather Sherman’s eyebrows rise only a little at what Marco proposes. Three months ago, he would have laughed. But instead he has the guards bring Marco outside again, then sits in his wingback chair, scratching behind his ear.
Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America Page 25