Air Force One, Part One (4) There are fifteen rigs in the lot, several of them without trailers, and the parking spaces are angled so that Mick can see down the wide aisles between the trucks as he walks slowly toward the shed. No one is hiding in the parking lot. Anyway, as he approaches them he sees that the dogs aren't pointed toward the truck parking area at all, but rather out toward the exit ramp and the highway and forest beyond. It doesn't make sense. If they're not under armed attack, then it has to be something they hear or smell in the woods, and that has to mean an animal of some sort. But the four of them together would take on absolutely anything in the wild without a second thought, up to and including a bear. He knows, because they did it once. It probably wasn't the largest specimen of that species in the world, but it was a real live and perfectly healthy bear. They held it at bay with its back against a tree until he arrived and persuaded them to desist and the bear to leave. Mick has no doubt that, knowing they had him at their back and carrying his shotgun, his dogs would take on anything up to and including a wolf pack. His approach emboldens them as he expected it would. They bark even more angrily, although still with that troubling tinge of fear, and advance a few quick steps as he comes up close behind them. Well then, he decides, let's just go and see. "Let's go, girls!" he calls to them, and strides up to their position fully expecting them to go charging ahead as soon as they understand his intention. But incredibly, they stay behind and quickly fall silent. He turns and stares back at them wide-eyed, suddenly feeling the chill air against the back of his neck much more distinctly than he has any wish to. Under his astonished gaze they lower their heads and look away, trotting nervously from side to side, circling back, looking up at him and then away again. Banjo, who has always been something like their leader, whines quietly. Although they know something is out there that they hate, they're so afraid of it that they won't go too far from the relative safety of the big shed. Not even to accompany him. If it was something that they judged he could handle with his man-weapons, they would fall in behind him, but at least keep up the challenge: barking into the night to show their strength, resolve, and numbers. And they would stay only a short distance behind, ready to support him once he used the man-weapons. That's what they might do with a big, strange predator, like a panther or something. But by falling silent and staying put, they're effectively begging him not to go out there either. As though they already know what it is, and don't believe that they, or he, or all of them put together can handle it. Mick holsters the shotgun and walks back into their midst, letting them nuzzle him nervously. Blackie and Mr. Chips hang their heads and go back toward the shed. Brownie stand some yards away to sniff the October air for a few thoughtful seconds, and then she too turns back for the shed. Only Banjo stands next to him, looking out toward the dark woods beyond the old highway. He half-kneels next to her, facing in the same direction, and scratches the top of her broad head. "What is it, girl?" he asks her, wishing as never before that she could answer. "What's out there?" The wind rustles oak leaves, and moves on. The Kitchen Anne walks into the big kitchen carrying a bushel basket half-full of potatoes. Mick looks at her wearily but still, as always lately, with some caution. Surprised to see him, she sets the basket down and takes a step in his direction, but stops halfway when he makes no motion to greet her. "Michael," she asks quietly, "what was it last night? Did the dogs see something?" "Oh, so you did hear them?" he asks with mock surprise. He knows perfectly well that she did not hear anything except him banging on her door. She slept through the commotion until that point because she was in Melanie's old room, on the other side of the house from the noise. Not with him. And she knows that he knows it, and they both know exactly where this line of conversation will quickly lead. She dismisses it with a compression of the lips, a turn of the head, a lowering of the eyelids too slow to be a blink. There is a kind of code involved here that the two of them, practicing long enough together, have learned. She looks up at him again with a challenge in her eyes. Are we going to talk about this, or are you going to make it completely pointless? "It was nothing," he replies. "They were just barking." "They don't bark at nothing," she says, but he looks away out the window at the distant treeline. "Michael," she persists, "I have the strangest feeling right now. I don't know what it is." She frowns. "I feel like something's just � not right here." "Oh!" He looks back, eyebrows raised. "And when was the last time you felt like something was right here? Two years ago?" She glances down, tight-lipped, saying nothing for the space of several breaths, then looks up again at him angrily. "You know what I'm talking about! Or then why did you take the gun outside last night? What were you really afraid was going to be out there?" Mick looks back at her grimly, but makes no response. "Michael, you know it's only a matter of time before the gangs come out here, even if they don't find out about you and Johnny." He scowls at that. Talking about the Bolo is off-limits except in the most private and guarded moments. She knows that. "Everybody out there knows about it," she lowers her voice to an angry whisper, gesturing toward the dining room which is, in fact, empty this early in the morning. "Every trucker in America knows about it! How long do you think it'll be before some warlord finds out? It might not even be around here. Some trucker will get ambushed in Kansas or someplace, and he'll tell them. And the Novis will know all about it ten minutes later. Can you imagine what they would pay to know who was running that tank?" "Annie!", he whispers back furiously, raising his hand to gesture for immediate silence. But his anger fades. Looking at her face, he knows that she's right. He has known it for a year. "And then what happens?" she demands. "What happens when they come here?" The dawn is coming, red in the storm clouds that have persisted, taller than mountains, even through the night. They're quiet now, but any fool can see that the next storm can't be very far off. There will be thunder again, and rain, even though, in the world he grew up in, there could never have been such storms at this time of year: when the leaves are falling and blowing in the wind, when the pumpkins are ripe and ought to be feeling the first touch of hard frost. It is pointless to argue that he and his customers could protect the truck stop. He knows that they could not. "Let me call him down, then!" he says to her urgently. "He'll can be here in three hours! In a week, there won't be a gang soldier left alive in Michigan." She looks at him, already intent on this new project, with his perpetual instant enthusiasm. He has always been air and fire. She has always been earth and water. He has always been her warrior. "Then they'll come from Ohio," she says. "And Chicago. And they'll bring their own tanks." They do have tanks, now. The gangs that started out with nothing but handguns and anger have conquered armories left half-empty, and nearly deserted by the Wars. Those who were slow to adapt to the realities of the new world have been quickly engulfed by those who were not. The survivors have become armies with all the weapons of armies: land mines and sniper rifles, shoulder-launched rockets, artillery, and tanks. "There's not a tank in this world that can take him," the warrior states with utter certainty, leaning a little towards her as if ready to leap into battle at a word. But the warrior's ferocity masks desperation. "Then they'll use nukes," she says. And he knows that they would. They will have even those by now. Tactical nukes, fancy technology sub-critical mass weapons that were probably manufactured by the thousand in the last months of the Last War, and many of which were simply � lost. Lost in the chaos of war, their makers, masters, and guardians all consumed by the fires that they set, leaving behind no trace of themselves but the dead multitudes, the scars on the earth, and the perfect gleaming weapons dozing in shallow crypts. Magic swords, waiting to feel the greedy grip of new masters on their hilts. By now, the gangs will have broken the release-codes or bypassed the security systems built into the weapons. If they couldn't figure out how to do it themselves then they would find, somewhere, people who knew how. And if they haven't used them against each other yet, it's only because they still feel some fear of the remnants of the old government, or, more likely, because they still have very few of these greatest of all weapons and they want to know how strong or weak are their adversaries. In any case, it won't be long now until nuclear war returns to this land. And if he were fool enough to charge forth into battle with his durachrome steed, the gangs' warlords would not hesitate even now to spend their most potent weapons once they truly understood the nature of the threat. If they sent an airplane to deliver the weapon from above, Johnny would knock it out of the sky considerably more easily than his commander could down a pheasant with his shotgun. Johnny once defended himself from M1 battle tanks at point-blank range by knocking their rounds out of the air with his own. But he accomplished that feat by "hearing" the attackers' firing mechanisms: sensing subtle vibrations in their interiors by playing laser light on their skins. Comparing the vibrations to his detailed knowledge of their inner workings had given him hundreds of milliseconds' advance warning of the firing of each main gun. More than enough to allow Johnny to calculate an interception trajectory accurate enough to hit a bullet with a bullet. But if the tactical nuke came, as would be most likely anyway, in the form of an artillery shell arcing down without warning over the tree-tops at five times the speed of sound? Then even Johnny's lightning-quick senses would be doing well to merely become aware of the threat before its inconceivably brilliant detonation. And then the world's last Mark III-Alpha Bolo, Unit of the Line JNY-013 � Johnny � would die. And his new idiot of a commander with him. And the future would die a quiet voice whispers inside him. If Johnny stays where he is, hidden in the north-western forests, the gangs will never become fully aware of him. That part of the state is becoming progressively less accessible to them in any case, as successive winters without maintenance degrade its lighter highways more rapidly than the big Interstates. Surrounded on two sides by the Great Lakes and everywhere else by a hundred miles of forest, that region is quickly becoming one of the least accessible places in the continent. With the sensors that he has planted, Johnny will know if even a single unwanted warrior intrudes anywhere within his great perimeter. Inevitably, the warlords of southern Michigan will occasionally send scouting parties northward. Many will go straight north, to the Mackinaw Bridge as their only portal to the vast empty lands of the northern peninsula, Wisconsin, and Canada. Those scouts and messengers will live to return to their masters and make their reports. But those who veer just a little westward, toward Traverse City and the rumored location of the new University at Interlochen � they will not. Over the years some warlords may notice, and wonder. But even the attentions of the most inquisitive of them will be distracted by the incessant strife with strong competitors from Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Pressed to deal with them, he will reflect that at least no threat can come to him from those increasingly trackless forests of the northwest. He will never quite feel able to afford the expense of sending a force of the size and strength that would be required to explore the region properly. Not merely for curiosity's sake. So the years will pass, and the roads will worsen, and Johnny will become nothing more than a rumor. A one hundred and fifty ton durachrome ghost, haunting distant forests. But behind him, the people of those forests will survive. And they'll be free. Mick shivers, coming back to himself, and looks again at his wife of thirty years. Her blue-gray eyes are watching him, as calm and as certain as the evening sky. "OK", he says finally. "Johnny stays where he is." "And us?" she asks. He looks away out the window again, over the fields. Just then they hear the sounds of the morning's first customers coming into the dining room. The chairs scrape on the floor and a man coughs tiredly. Pretty soon they'll be wanting coffee. "You know," he looks back at her, "the gangs might never come out this far. They might not figure out about us. About Johnny and all that." She looks away, so he continues quickly. "You know how they're always fighting each other. And it's not like Ann Arbor's empty, you know. Not quite. People around here won't go for the gangs. We'll stand up to them! In a few years the whole gang thing will be fading out, and we will be able to bring Johnny down here. And Melanie can come down," he says, frowning with the effort of continuing to believe his own tale. "She can come down when her studies are over." "Michael," his wife says. Their eyes lock for a moment, but then he looks away again, preferring to watch the firelight still visible through the big stove's grating. The large pot of water on the stove top is heating for coffee, just as it has done on almost every day of the last twelve years. "That's never going to happen," she states. "You know that it won't. Why do you want to pretend? Why are you lying to yourself? "Pretty soon �", she steps closer and he turns further away. "Pretty soon that part of the state will be the only place left where decent people can live. You know I'm right. You made it happen! Why won't you go? You know she's going to want to stay even after she finishes with the schooling. She doesn't just need Johnny up there, she needs me and you." "And what do I need," he says much too loudly. But what the hell. It's not like all their customers don't already know. "Wasn't there supposed to be a time � sometime in this goddamn life � for what I need? Don't I get a few years somewhere, where I can just live my life without worrying for every goddamn minute about the future? "I did not make Traverse City happen. It wanted to happen, and I let it. And that's great. It's a good thing. It's wonderful. I'm happy. But this", he slams his palm against the heavy countertop hard enough to shake it. "This is the place that I made. This is the only place that has ever been mine. Don't you understand that? Haven't you noticed? "Melanie has her school," he continues. "You have your religion or faith or whatever the hell it is. What do I have?" But of course, when he most needs to hear her say something, Annie can never speak at all. Eyes filling with tears, she turns and hurries from the room. And after thirty years it's his fault as much as hers, isn't it? It's not as though any nuance of an argument can surprise either of them anymore. After so much time together every thing that they say to each other � the way that they stand, every gesture, the issues that they choose to make explicit or leave implicit, the order in which they raise the issues, which items they emphasize more or less than they did previously � everything means more than it appears to. As though there is a whole life of meaning hidden behind the life that everyone can see. And what hurts him most now � what brings that terrible, sinking, eviscerated feeling to him � is not the simple fact that they have argued again, if briefly. It is instead the calmer, clearer � and even shorter � conversation that has happened behind their overt speech. In that conversation, she has just stated simply: I am leaving. And he has replied: I am staying. And, he realizes slowly, this time, it really is true. So. So his heart has stopped beating. The blood has stopped flowing through his veins. Leaning against the countertop for long minutes, he feels a cold alchemy spreading its deadly transformation through his still-living cells, through the nerves, through bones and blood, through the remotest and most sacred chambers of the heart. He can feel the chill of an unwelcome eternity settling upon his soul. It's funny, he reflects. He has always told her that their arguments would kill him someday. In the end, though, it was not an argument that finally finished him off. It was an agreement. After a certain amount of time the innkeeper's corpse tires of wondering whether or not it will actually fall to the floor. You can get used to anything it tells itself. The thought whispers, like the cooling October breeze, like the thought of skittering leaves gusting through a mind that now remains forever trapped in a desiccated brain. You can get used to anything at all. Bestirring its dead limbs, the corpse straightens. It shifts its weight and walks, stiffly at first, about the kitchen. Its customers will still want their coffee. That, at least, gives it something to do.
Copyright © 1999 Michael Goulish |