We had been walking slowly along the sidewalk and were now in front of Tower Records. The others had already gone in, but Pete was standing in the doorway waiting for us. “I know you guys are discussing something I wasn’t supposed to hear,” he said. “But are you talking about the suits?”
“Why?”
“I know they’re here. I saw one outside Sizzler.”
Philipe pulled him away from the door. “How many of the others know?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. None of them, probably. I haven’t talked about it with anyone, I thought I should talk to you first.”
Philipe grinned. “You’re a rock, Pete.”
I looked around again.
“They’re not here now,” Philipe said.
“So what are we going to do?” Pete asked.
“Take them out.”
I shook my head. “They’re not alone. They’re working for somebody. They’ve already checked in by now, called or radioed to their bosses to tell them where we are. We could kill them, but more would come. We have to get out of here.”
Philipe thought for a moment. “You may be right,” he said. “One thing’s for sure, though. We have to tell the others. Then we’ll vote on it. But we can’t just stay here and do nothing. It’s not safe. We either take them out or hit the road, or both.”
“Agreed.”
“All right, then. Let’s head for home. Meeting time.”
We voted to stay.
And hide.
The polling was unanimous, except for Philipe. Everyone else seemed to be tired of killing, and despite what had happened to Buster, no one was in the mood to seek revenge. We were scared and wanted only to lay low.
“But where’ll we go?” Mary asked.
“There are a lot of nice homes in a new subdivision on the south end of town,” Joe suggested.
“How’s the access?” Philipe asked. “Any gates? How many roads in and out? Will we be able to keep the place secure?”
“Don’t worry.”
“The suits aren’t playing games,” Philipe said. “If they’re here, they’re here for a reason. They’ve already killed one of us—”
“Joe can tell the police chief about these guys,” Tim pointed out. “He can have them hauled in for harassment or something. We can find out who they are, why they’re after us.”
Joe nodded. “I will.”
Philipe paused for only a second. “All right,” he said. “But be careful. If they know you’re one of us, they may try to take you out, too.”
“Don’t worry.”
Philipe nodded. “Okay. From now on, we’ll have someone on watch at all times, twenty-four hours a day.” He turned toward Joe. “Show us where this place is.”
We drove to the subdivision, took an empty ranch-style house at the end of a cul-de-sac so we could spot all corners. Joe did talk to the police chief and arranged for a patrol car to be stationed at the entrance of the subdivision. He gave the police a description of the suits, confirmed that the local police knew nothing about them, and made sure that the police would pick up any suits they could find for questioning.
“I think you’re safe,” Joe said.
“Maybe,” Philipe told him. “But I’m still keeping a man on watch. Just in case.”
It happened that night.
Once again, it was during a sandstorm. We were at the house. We’d been planning a barbecue, but the sandstorm had come and we’d moved inside, where Mary put the half-cooked chicken into the oven. We were sitting around waiting for the food, talking, drinking beer, watching a videotape of Top Gun, when I suddenly noticed that Philipe was gone.
He might’ve been in the bathroom, he might’ve been in the kitchen, but something told me that he wasn’t, and I quickly searched the rooms of the house and determined that he was not there. I opened the front door, looked outside. Through the blowing sand, I could see that all of our cars were still parked out in front.
And then I saw Philipe.
He was inside the house next door. I could dimly make out his silhouette through one of the side windows.
Something about that alerted me, sent up my antennae. I had a sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach, and I ran outside, jumped the small wooden fence that separated the two homes, and sped up to the porch next door. The front door was wide open, despite the sandstorm, and I walked right in. I hurried past the window where I’d seen Philipe, through a den, into a hallway. Philipe was before me, walking toward the far end of the hall.
In his hand was a carving knife.
“Philipe!” I yelled.
He ignored me, kept walking.
“Philipe!” I ran forward.
He was mumbling, talking to himself. I heard him say, “Yes,” and the way he said it sounded as though he were talking to someone.
God?
Chills cascaded down my arms as I remembered him suggesting, when I first joined the terrorists, that God had chosen us for this work.
“Yes,” he said again, and he seemed to be answering a question. “I will.”
But he’d claimed that he didn’t hear voices.
“No,” he said to his unseen questioner.
“Philipe!” I grabbed his shoulder. He whirled around, swung at me with the knife, but when he saw who I was, pulled back, missing me.
Then he punched me in the nose.
I fell back against the wall, stunned and hurt, blood spilling from my nostrils and backing up into my throat. I spit, stood, tried to breathe. Philipe was gone, no longer in the hallway, and a split second later I heard a child’s staccato screams.
I ran through the open doorway at the end of the hall. Philipe was on his knees in the center of a pink girl’s room, flanked by twin beds. He was covered with blood, his eyes white and crazy in the midst of the red, and he was hacking at two small unmoving children on the ground before him.
“My name’s not David!” he screamed. “It’s Philipe!” He swung the knife, sliced into a shoulder. “My name is Philipe!”
I was pushed aside as a woman ran screaming into the room. Her screams stopped abruptly as the horror of the scene imprinted itself onto her brain. She fainted dead away, not collapsing gently and gracefully to the floor as women did in movies but falling flat and heavy, her head hitting the wooden floor with a hard thud, her outstretched right hand flopping into a puddle of her daughters’ blood.
There was a pink dresser next to the door. On top of the dresser were two piggy banks, and I picked one up and heaved it at Philipe’s head.
It hit, bounced off, and broke on the floor, pennies spilling into the blood. Philipe shook his head, blinked, and at the same time seemed to see for the first time the knife in his hand, the dead girls before him and me standing by the door. It was as if he had awakened from a trance, and he looked at me with weak, frightened eyes. “I didn’t… I had no… I had to—”
“Save it,” I said.
“Help me clean this up. Help me get rid of this.” He stared up at me frantically, beseechingly, holding out his bloody hands, palms up.
Part of me felt sorry for him, but it was a small part of me. “No,” I said disgustedly.
“Something would’ve happened to us if I didn’t—”
“What?” I demanded. “What would have happened to us?”
He started to cry. It was the first time I had ever seen Philipe cry and the sight tore at me, but the other sights in the room tore at me more. I could not forgive him for this. I could not justify what he had done. I would never defend him simply because we were both of a kind. Our kinship could not excuse this butchery.
“I’m out of the terrorists,” I said.
“Don’t tell the others—”
“Fuck you.”
I walked out of the bedroom, out of the house, through the sandstorm back to Tim’s. I told everyone what had happened, what I had seen, and hushed and silent, they went next door. Steve and Junior stayed to help Philipe clean up the mess. The rest return
ed, shocked into silence.
“I’m out,” I said when they got back. “I resign.”
“You can’t resign,” Pete said.
“Why not?”
“You’re Ignored. You can’t just stop being Ignored by saying so.”
“Yeah, I’ll always be Ignored. But I’m no longer a Terrorist for the Common Man. I’m resigning from the terrorists. I can’t follow Philipe. He’s crazy.”
“But we’ve all killed,” Paul said. “Doesn’t that mean we’re all crazy?”
“If you can’t see the difference, I can’t explain it to you.” I looked around at my friends, my brothers, my sister. “I’m leaving,” I said. “Does anyone want to come with me?”
“Where are you going?” James asked quietly.
“I don’t know.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Joe said. “I’m mayor here. This is my town.”
I nodded. “I understand.”
“I don’t want to leave either,” Tim said. “I’m not with Philipe, but I’m staying.”
Mary stepped forward. “We’ll come with you,” she said. “Jim and I will come.” She looked toward Jim, and he nodded.
“I’m corning,” James said.
“Me, too.” Don.
In the end, Bill and John and Tommy and Pete and Paul voted to stay with Philipe. I knew Steve and Junior would do the same, so I didn’t even bother waiting until they came back to ask them.
“How quickly can you pack?” I asked.
James gave me a wan grin. “I never unpacked.”
We were gone before Philipe and the other two had returned. I promised to call, to keep in touch, but at that moment I was not sure if I would. Too many conflicting emotions were churning within me. More than anything else, I wanted to be free of this burden of being Ignored. I wanted to be just a regular person again, to not have to worry about the suits or think about killings or plan ways to overthrow “the system.” I did not want the mantle of responsibility that I had been forced to carry ever since I’d met Philipe. I just wanted to live my life in peace and quiet.
We walked through the blowing sand to Jim’s van. Already, I was starting to regret my decision to break away. The horror of what I’d seen had already begun to fade, and I found myself starting to rationalize Philipe’s actions, telling myself he was sick, he couldn’t help it, he didn’t know what he was doing.
Already, I was starting to miss Philipe.
I thought of Sea World.
No, I told myself. I couldn’t let these memories fade.
I’d made a decision and I was going to stick by it.
We left the subdivision, headed through the city toward Interstate 10. The winds had died down, and above us the stars were visible. A full moon, partially risen, made the sand dunes look blue.
“So where are we going?” James asked again.
I shook my head. “I don’t know. Got any ideas?”
“Back home?”
“Home where?”
“Our old homes, our real homes. Your apartment, my condo.”
“What if the suits are staking them out, waiting for us to come back?”
“After this long? Be serious.”
“Okay,” I said. “Sounds good to me. What about the rest of you?”
“I do kind of miss my house,” Don admitted.
We voted, and the vote was unanimous. “All right,” I said. “We’ll do it.” We pulled into an Arco gas station near the highway to tank up for the long drive back to Orange County. I walked into the AM/PM Mini-Mart to snag some snacks while James pumped the gas.
The man behind the counter was Ignored.
We stared at each other. There was no one else in the small convenience store but us, and I stood there, stunned, facing the man behind the counter. He was young and clean-shaven, with long brown hair, and he looked a little like Tim.
“You,” he said finally. “You’re Ignored.”
I nodded. For some reason, I thought of Philipe’s policy about not taking on anyone who had not yet killed his boss. This guy was still working. He had obviously not taken out his boss.
“My name is Dan,” he said.
“Hi,” I said warily. I had been planning to steal some Twinkies and cookies and potato chips, but I thought now that I would pay for them. I didn’t want to get this guy into trouble. He was one of us.
“Are you from Thompson?”
Thompson? I shook my head, not understanding.
“Are you going there?”
“Excuse me?”
“Thompson.”
I stared at him blankly.
His eyes widened in surprise. “You don’t know about Thompson?”
“No.” I looked out the window, saw James replacing the nozzle on the gas pump. I had no idea what the hell this guy was talking about. The thought occurred to me that he was out of it, like Paul when we’d found him.
“I’m from Thompson.”
That meant nothing to me.
“Thompson is our city.”
“Our city?”
He nodded. “Our city.”
I stared at him, suddenly realizing what he was talking about. I cleared my throat. “You mean… a city of people like us?”
“Of course. It’s the city of the Ignored.”
The city of the Ignored.
I had sudden visions of a vast underground world, a honeycomb of caverns and tunnels that housed a massive secret society. I thought of the buried city under Seattle. I’d seen it as a child on an old Night Stalker TV movie, and something about that entombed metropolis, coexisting with the urban world above, appealed to me. For some reason, that was how I imagined the city of the Ignored.
The city of the Ignored.
A city where everyone was exactly like us.
The very thought of it made my blood pump faster.
Dan nodded, grinning. “I was born there. I left a few years ago, figured I’d bum around the country, get some life experience. I’m a writer. Writers need lots of life experience.”
“But… but this city… Thompson?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s filled only with people who are Ignored?”
“Yeah.” He shook his head. “Shocked the hell out of me when I saw you walk through that door. You’re the first Ignored I’ve seen in the past three years. I thought all of them lived in Thompson.”
“There’s more of us in the van. And there’s even more in Desert Palms. The mayor’s Ignored.”
“No shit?”
“No shit.”
“Whoa.”
“Listen,” I said, “would you like to take us there, to Thompson? We’ll give you a lift. All you have to do is give us directions.”
“No way, Jose. I’m staying right where I am. Do you know how many weirdos come through those doors on the night shift?” He shook his head. “I’m telling you, between midnight and dawn, it’s a freak show.” He pointed to a ringed binder sitting next to the cash register. “And I’m getting it all down.”
I nodded, forced myself to smile. I felt sorry for the guy. Didn’t he realize what it meant to be Ignored? No matter how great his book was—and it wouldn’t be great, it would be average—no one was going to read it. No matter what he did, no one was going to pay any attention to him.
“Well, could you tell me how to get there?” I asked.
“It’s a suburb of Phoenix. It’s near Glendale, just west of Phoenix.”
“Can you draw a map or something?”
“It’s not on a real map, and I couldn’t draw one to save my life. Besides, I don’t think the road to it has a name. But don’t worry, you’ll find it.”
James walked into the mini-mart, followed by Jim and Mary.
“Is there a ladies’ room here?” Mary asked.
Dan pointed toward the rear of the store. “Through that door by the fountain.”
Mary stared. “You heard me!”
The clerk laughed. “We’re all Ignored on this bus.”
>
“There’s a city,” I said. “A city of the Ignored. He’s from there. It’s called Thompson, and it’s just outside of Phoenix.”
The others were silent.
“Still want to go home, or do you want to try for it?”
“Let’s go back,” James said. “Tell the others.”
“Yeah,” Mary said. “Philipe should know about this.”
I considered it for a moment, then nodded reluctantly. “Okay,” I said. “We’ll tell them. But I’m still going on my own. Once we tell them, I’m out of there. I’m serious. I’m not a terrorist anymore.”
“We’re with you,” James said.
“This is going in my book,” Dan said. “This is good stuff.” He had opened his binder and was busily scribbling notes.
“I’m going to the bathroom,” Mary said, walking toward the rear of the mini-mart.
“Get Don,” I told James. “He might as well hear this, too.”
“This is great,” Dan said, grinning. “This is great.”
Philipe was back to his normal self by the time we returned to the house, as charming and charismatic and persuasive as ever, but I stuck to my guns, and after we’d spelled everything out and given directions on how to get to the Arco station, we were off.
I turned toward Joe before we left. “You still staying?” I asked.
He nodded. “Thompson might be your city, but Desert Palms is my city. This is my home.”
“Are you going to carry on the work we started?”
He smiled, nodded. “Ego trip over. I’m working for The Cause.”
I clapped a hand on his back. “You’re a good man, Joe. I knew it the first time I saw your photo in that newspaper. Whatever happens from here on out, I’m glad we met you. I’m glad I knew you. And I’ll never forget you.”
“Shit. I’m not dying. I’m just staying.”
I smiled. “I know.”
It was after midnight by this time, and I was too tired to drive, so I turned the wheel over to Jim. Mary promised to keep him awake, and I moved into the back of the van with the others.
I had never gone to see my parents’ graves.
I had not thought about that before, and it occurred to me for the first time as we were traveling on the highway past Indio, heading toward the Arizona border. After all the trouble I’d gone through to find out where my mom and dad were buried, I had not even made the effort to go the cemetery and see where they were interred.
The Ignored Page 29