*
“The Wicked Flee When no Man Pursueth”
*
WASHINGTON, DC
*
“My Fellow Americans…” What follows is gorgeous. The President of the United States evokes the coat of arms on his desk (still visible) and the contents of the American Eagle’s talons: the peaceful olive branch and the quiver of fuck-you-up. Close up of his face, serious brow seriously furrowed: “Make no mistake” and that’s the exquisite threat “I’ll burn your house down and salt the Earth” part of the speech aimed to the “heartland.”
Cold War kayfabe: “Our enemies, through espionage and sneak-thievery, reverse engineered a hole in our national defense.” And he speaks of the classified system “Centurion” by name that the wily communist or Cossak (or maybe both) bested, it’s not quite clear.
The whole thing is brilliant, absolutely brilliant. When I was alive, the first time, on some Earth I sat in the Big House for a football game. I saw a last minute Hail Mary silence 100,000 people. Take that silence and spread it over a continent as 320 million Americans (and 10 million wheezing, sputtering ghosts) gather round every tee-vee, mobile screen, holo-pro, and even old radio to watch the President speak. Love or hate or any shade of “meh”– everyone’s got a vested interest in whether or not Hoover ends the world to avenge that asshole from Anchorage.
The asshole from Anchorage is strangely absent from the speech, but Roofus the bona-fide hero dog is very present. And in Roofus name (amen) and with that dog’s vigilance and dogged determination the guy in the suit praises the people in the uniforms with the flag patches. And the speech is that perfect mix of sabers rattled and checking the locks on the doors and windows a few times that the American audience needs in that moment. Domestically sublime. Abroad? Oh, it was perceived as a threat wrapped in the promise of response-and-escalation. And the Doomsday Clock Hung not 10 seconds from midnight.
But like most things American, the speech was by and for and about Americans as if they were the world entire. And besides, they attacked us, well not really us, that asshole from Anchorage. Brett, wait, Ben. Ben from Anchorage, Alaska (as much a part of America as any other). This is about all of us, what if that was your shitty husband who got smooshed by a piece of Cold War trash in a clear act of war? In the face of all that, the collectively intimate spectacle of the speech did calm the people. It let them know ‘the cavalry is coming’–riding the levitational hiss-hum of so many and so mighty a Shulz-Warren generator.
The first “Barrage Balloons” are announced as they float toward the cities they will defend. There’s no hiding them once they’re hovering over coastal metropoles. And there is no implementing and managing the whole network of the great floating war machines, each mothership and all her drones, without the new distributed-quantum-being: a true AI named Abel.
*
ARCHIVES/SQUATTERSVILLE, PA
*
RETROACTIVE RECONSTRUCTION: ARCHIVAL RECORD ((0X7C0) COMMENTARIES AND SUB-COMMENTARIES). AUTHOR: A(0x54).
Squattersville (before the ‘war’ and Abel’s takeover and Dolores’ ascension) appears to be a town, but it’s a truce. Not even that, a temporary “cease-fire” held together by duct tape and loving neglect. You are welcome, “all are welcome” was a slogan once in the tent-cities and camps that popped up in the twenty-teens roughly, but that was before.
My world had a thing called “Occupy”, and it got busted up and shut down rather violently. Earth(0x7C0) had The Jubilee. Most Earths hit this tipping point in the 21st Century. It’s a lot of climate crisis and economic inequality a lot of racist violence and fascist ghosts with fantasies of supremacy. It’s a lot of storms on the horizon and the “obligation to endure” and some kind of people wanting to make a raft out of other people to ride out the flood-biblical. Dear human, if that’s your answer to the big-rain? Know that you and your ilk are why it is coming.
The Jubilee was a lot like Occupy going for that “movement of movements” vibe. But it was a lot more fun? Think the Yippies, but like politically productive (in that they were peacefully disruptive). And they were so peacefully disruptive that things started to kind of look like one big Flint or Winnipeg style strike, a spasm (if not the big general strike).
But that’s the thing, someone said the words “general strike” and someone else did their job in terms of recording it or scribbling it down and passed it up the chain. I’m not privy to the specifics of what instructions or orders came back down the chain, but it meant a lot of tear gas and rubber bullets. A lot of cracked skulls and ‘cleared camps’, and people doing ‘make an example’ prison terms for destruction of (very well insured) property.
Squattersville is the next thing. It’s the form politics takes off-to-the-side and in the cracks between the places money still wants. There’s the Hoovervilles. Then there’s the (growing) squat-and-tend movement in the empty places-the odd suburbs and the infill left hollow by pandemic and the insurgency and the mini-migrations where-to-where–where the work is and the rent’s low enough to live and ‘where the people are.’
It’s not utopian, Squattersville. It’s a weed in a crack in a badly damaged sidewalk. And the weed, and every ‘town’ like it, has such a firmly-tenuous grip on existence. I cannot help but marvel at it.
For all that was lost from the archives, I’ve found this nugget at the bottom of the archival well-maw: Earth(0x7C0) was the one world where “defensive architecture” reached its perverse apotheosis. Every under-bridge was spiked or uneven-textured concrete at angles unfit for human lounging. Every bench in the United States, and many in lobbies and waiting rooms had a coin slot/credit card reader and some wicked spikes protruding from it’s sitting surface and/or back. For a ‘nominal’ fee, one could lounge for a few minutes. Sometimes the spikes came up quick, sometimes slow. And sometimes by accidental water ingress and electric short, or sometimes on purpose rigged by a sadist, the spikes would give one an electric jolt as well.
Zora Nelson. Just an old lady with a heart condition in Pittsburgh. She gets off a city/county bus on a hot summer day. Heavy wet air,. Thick air the quality of an old timey photo. It’s like breathing aerosolized peanut butter. She’s walking the half mile home in the burbs, passes a park, spends retiree-money to rest her bones and gets the shock that ends her life. And it’s a damned shame, as I hope historians on that world would have remarked, that it took a sweet old lady and several dozen unhoused people dying on those shockboxes before people simply began destroying them. .
Zora Nelson, a kindly old grandmother died a stupid, cruel death during a heat wave during an already politically restless season. When Pittsburgh, and quite a few other major cities, refused to lose the revenue stream of pay-to-sit benches. The Jubilee got more joyous, and the historical rhyme repeated, the “movement of movements.”, the neo-Yippies joined already-seething protests over climate catastrophe and “being nickle-and-dimed to death.” Once again, the riot cops and the kettling-to-beat whole clumps and crowds and gaggles of protestors (and whomever else). Breaking up the camps and tent cities and skid rows. Heavy federal prison time for anybody who sneezed on private property.
But right when it seems the song is the same old shitty tune, just when the first couple of verses trained your ear for a minor chord, for cops or Pinkertons or some kind of goon to come club the long hairs and the protestors and the students and the people singing “Bread and Roses”?
The music of all spheres heavenly-political-economic/social changed. As if time-the-river read god’s intentions, the divine intervention coming later, and cut a new path. Or perhaps probability sensed the loaded dice divine and went about collapsing to actual in a way accommodating to the author-of-all.
*
If Squattersville were the UN (it’s not), three people: The Mayor, the Preacher, and Shimmer would be the “Security Council.” When Jane came home looking to lay low? She and the golem got the nod for sanctuary +1 from the first two. ‘Shim’ would be a harder sell.
Top floor, one of the 3-floor tall, restored communal squats at the heart of Squattersville. Attic apartment. Glenn, wearing a blue tarp like a robe. Jane, leading the tall bearded man by the hand.
Old-school LED projector and a hanging screen, the couch and beanbags oriented cross-room-wise. There’s a Kung-Fu flick on. The volume is cranked well past polite to the rest of the house, but they needed to signal their disdain and displeasure to Jane and the as-yet-not-welcome guest. They are, for reasons we shan’t speak of, a legend and a local benevolent (if intimidating) cryptid: Shimmer (‘Shim’ or ‘Shimmy’ to those who dare).
She sits at a desk in front of a lit mirror, back to them. They’ve got to walk through the forest of exercise implements and free weights and through the puzzle-path-piles of books and scribbled notes and sketches. Jane and Glenn must be bathed in the light of the projector. Jane drags him through the light. She thinks she feels his hand warm. Glenn’s body drinks the light and learns and remembers. The room reeks of lavender and weed–the smell of the liniment Shimmer’s rubbing on her shoulders under a heavy bathrobe.
(“Lemme do the talking.”) Jane whispers “I will.” Full volume. Bat ears. Shim hears, pauses the film.
“You’ll let her do the talking?” Shimmer lights a joint she rolled for herself, conical and perfect and huge and potent. She’s still coughing, “The fuck you will.” Fuck that’s harsher than I. She spins on her stool dramatically, continues. “Who are you, dude? Why should we offer you sanctuary in Squattersville?”
“Shim.” Nope. Familiarity revoked. “Shimmer, please.” Your name is Jane-be-silent. You, dude. Who are you?
“I’ll choose to be called Glenn, eventually, but that’s a narrative arc that cannot be allowed to happen again. So I’ll name myself now.”
The women have a side conversation via facial expression. ‘He’s crazy.’ Shimmer stands up, steps down from her desk. The tall, heavily-and-exquisitely-muscled woman meets him eye to eye, a few steps away. “When will you choose to be called Glenn, or maybe, when did you first choose that name?”
The golem gestures toward the big, muscled woman: “In the story where you loved me. Where I stayed here a long time. You show me your favorite story-game.” Which one is that? “The one with the time travel and the locust. And the toad knight.” Time Traitor? “No the other one, the better one. The perfect one.” There’s only one game I’d call perfect. “I know, because you play-replayed it as a girl and it taught you to ‘read-really-read'” Enough. Stop it.
But he doesn’t ‘stop it.’ There’s a gold glow in his eyes and throat and belly and the light about them seems to dim, “and you read past the game and made a whole world for the girl who fixed the robot.” Shut up, Glenn. “Because you were like her. You always cried when you couldn’t fix the past, her past, the “ZABBY” code was too fast.”
Shimmer’s punch is a blur, so is Glenn’s dodge. The man stagger’s back, the instant-perfect imitation of the drunken-boxing on the screen.
Jane snatches Shim’s dropped joint from the floor, slaps out the minor paper-fire it almost started. “I swear to god” Enormous drag off the joint, choked voice. “No macho shit, Shim.”
“No familiarity for you.” Shim sags into a fighting stance, right handed only ‘giving’ half her profile to the golem. “You, what are you?” The golem, still wearing nothing but a tarp robe, girds up his loins, sways southpaw. “I’m animate clay, signifying dirt.”
Shim strikes again, steps quick, two jabs and a hook. He slaps, ducks, dances away. Glenn snatches the joint from Jane.
“Hey!” But in one mighty breath the thing the size of a blunt is gone. Glenn exhales from his nose and mouth like a dragon. There’s smoke drifting out his ears when he crouches and wobbles and stagger-dances with Shim, fists up.
They glow, the boxer and the stoned-drunken-boxer as they grapple and spar, Jane yelling at them to “Stahp!” from behind the couch the whole fight. Downstairs a floor, a dozen residents stare at a dancing ceiling unsure of what to do.
*
CHICAGO, “A FEW YEARS BACK”
*
“The golem doesn’t want to fight the warrior monk.” The exhausted judge is somber serious. Tries to take a sip from a coffee cup he emptied a while ago.
“Then why does he?” Jack is defiant. She’s droopy eye tired, but hanging on for a solid ending. She is a demanding and discerning audience.
“He has to!” The judge sits forward. “She’s the protector of that place, her people, and the other tribes gathered there. And this man?” Yeah? “He brought danger to her door.” Oh, It’s on. “It is so very “on”, kiddo. She summons her magic, cries “lightning fist!” and throws a million super-fast punches.” The tired judge shadowboxes. “He dodges every punch.”
“Every one of ’em?” That’s what I said. “Cause he’s fast?”
“You bet he’s fast, and silly and wobbly.” Like the Drunken Master? “Just like him.” And the girl giggles.
“Who wins?” No one. “What? Dad.”
“But no one loses either. The golem will not hurt the warrior monk because he is good and her people need their protector, but he wouldn’t let her hit him either.” Tie game? “Better than that: the warrior let Jane.” Jane Eyre. “The warrior let Jane Eyre and her golem friend Glen hide from their pursuers a while and rest and figure out a plan.”
The Judge kisses his already-almost-sleeping daughter on the forehead, sags back into the chair by her bed. “I’m right here baby, good night.” The Judge is asleep by the time he slurs ‘good.’
*
WASHINGTON DC
*
After his speech, the president bee-lined for the discreet place. The closest-to-alone place. The space that’s liminal but never lonely, because he’s the man not allowed to be alone. Not ever. It’s hell. There’s the appearance of power. There’s living in the White House. Then there’s not being alone, ever, not even taking a shit. He demands a smoke and one appears, then another. He paces the floor in ‘the room’, the one where the Kennedy tunnel spits out whomever it’s gonna spit out.
Hoover tosses the ass of his second cigarette on the concrete floor, grinds it, paces. It’s not five minutes later he’s snapping at his man and gesturing for another.
It’s the ‘discreet tunnel’ that’s been a known-thing since before that pretty man utilized it, but it’s one of the places with an ‘aura’, ‘gravitas’–where other responsibilities don’t follow. The gadfly schedule nags that own your life when you live here fear to tread a few (and only a few) places. The tunnel is one. And like those other discreet places, they offer the executive-who-is-never-alone one of the types of pseudo privacy he needs to do his job (or at least try).
“Those things’ll kill you, Mr. President” The spy, the guy who works in intelligence and should be witty. Again and again again with that nagging line.
Thaddeus Hoover takes a long drag. “Every asshole who has ever said that thinks they’re the first to say it. It’s the basement beneath dad joke, so please hear the sincerity: I wish they worked faster, like now.” You don’t mean that, Mr. President. “My political career is dead, so yes. Do you know how many times..” We’re talking security. “I can’t do the security thing if I’m a political corpse, it doesn’t work that way. Do you know how many times GNN said “Hooverville” in the last 24 hours alone?”
“I’m guessing it was quite a few.”
“Fuck you. Give me something, anything good.”
“Social media is, uh “blowing up.” Good? Bad? Mocking? Trolling? “Well, sir. DOD is concerned at all the footage of Barrage Balloons. “For fuck’s sake. “Well, the pinnacle of American technological might is now ‘Hoovering'” What now? “That’s the viral joke, and it’s not negative, sir. The barrage balloons are “Hoovering” over cities.” Hoover glares. “Look, they’re not saying Hooverville. That’s a win.”
“That’s not a win.”
“But it’s not a loss. So DOD is concerned. Everyone on Earth can just look up and get a peek at our used-to-be-secret weapons. This deployment is temporary?”
“That depends on the opponent.” Opponents? “One thing at a fucking time.” The president snaps, a cigarette appears.
“That brings me to the other thing” The space man? “The space man.” The spymaster stands beside his president holding the phone, shielding it. The phone, the digital conspirator glows. The glow grows till it’s a holo-image dancing all shitty and first-gen migraine-inducing–but with crystal clarity. It’s a slow drone fly through of a crime scene that might as well have been a war zone: the foundry.
Space man? “Yes, Mr. President. The space man in Pennsylvania did this.” The spy lies
“My god.”
Even here the man whispers: “I took the liberty of recalling the Triad” Why in the fuck. Hoover quiets himself: why in the fuck would those three apply?
“Mr. President”
Greater detail gore. Bodies bent into unnatural shapes. Good ol’boy insurgents and track-suits torn in half. “That’s why, Mr. President.” Space man really did this? “It would seem so, sir.” Find him. “Oh, we found him.” But? “He’s hiding in Squattersville.” Fucking socialist rabble. “Yessir. They’re insufferable, sir.”
“No scene. No martyrs. Two days. Talk them out.” But sir. “Make your little psychos play nice and use their words for at least 48 hours. I’m sleeping–or trying not to sleep–in a bunker where we watch the other world powers react-and-re-deploy like I know shit about shit. So maybe do what I say and manage the home front as told?” And President Hoover pivots with authority, let’s his back end the exchange, and walks like a condemned man to some command center or another in the belly of this building beneath the building where he lives.
*
SQUATTERSVILLE, PA (JUST SOUTH OF PITTSBURGH, PLANETFALL+2 DAYS)
*
The Preacher, dignified in dress and bearing, strolls down the main drag. He wears the collar of a priest. Though in his former life and official capacity as Reverend, that particular accessory wasn’t his uniform. Be not shocked or offended by the appropriation, nor be thy smug. He brings good words to those here, mostly political and local-managerial. But these people are his ‘flock’ and he cares for as many as he can know (which is many).
He waves to the house with the pirate flag, the not-fond-of-private-property types you’d expect (who don’t like the anarchists across the street in their organized and tidy house).
Shouts good morning to the comrades, the Marxists in the great tall corner house, the big thing with the foundation that starts like a castle turret and ends in an attic Cupola. The porch that clings to the house and around the side. This, monument-house that dominates the block, the old thing that was a mini-mansion in its 19th century moment. The house that set the horror flick tone into the 21st century till this little commune of communes came and lived in it and loved on it and restored it. ‘Red house’ is proud, and very red, literafiguratively.
The preacher gives that raised arm waive ‘I see you’ to the Fed standing just outside of town with the other Feds and the trucks and just enough police equipment to look imposing-but-not-authoritarian. More FED or STATECOP windbreakers and pistols and less on the tacticool war-gear. Preacher turns immediately away to gather himself.
Preacher strolls back to the Maoists in their similarly imposing, but very grey house, the squat brick construction thing. He visits the Trotskyites, in the great Victorian rectangle-cake of a house. The one with the delicate wooden lace-lattice, half gap tooth gone (but what’s left gorgeously restored). He says good morning to the tent dwellers in-between and around and among the houses, situationists and neo-Yippies and neo-hippies and neo-Luddites. He passes those occupying tents and lean-to’s and “tiny” homes built by their tribe of little tribes, that would be the movement-of-movements if history would move-or-be-moved.
Preacher stands in the street sipping a cup of coffee someone handed him along the way, warm and good and the way he likes it. He surveys the neighborhood restored and vital and pretty in the way people with good credit call ugly. Alive if not resplendent. Banners and signs and art and clucking chickens in coops and the “always gardening” so many raised beds and green houses and growing things practical and beautiful and both. There is the work of survival–of getting to work and back(for those that sell their labor) in a biodiesel battery-powered thing or by bike or foot to the edge of Pittsburgh-proper busses “a mile or two north a ways.”
And in between all this, between the gardens sad or glorious, between the plants and tents and the always-milling and circling chatting and singing and laughing and arguing people, only now fully awake and cooking and making coffee. Among them are the things, the statues, the totems, the “little libraries” and bits of whimsy–the art and embellishment that people ‘just do’ for whatever reason they like, sacred or silly or the sublime combination, but only when every waking minute is no longer committed to survival.
The place is precious and fragile, and the product of an informal truce. They’re squatters, product of population shifts and the ‘swiss-cheesing-of-America (and the hollowing-out of the world, for Rona did ravage (0x7C0)). They’re one bad interaction with the cops or feral people or someone tied to the ‘good ol boy’ insurgency away from losing their homes.
He feels the weight of responsibility for them, all of them, the whole squat. He sips his coffee, smiles waves at the Fed: “Good morning, and God Bless.”
There’s no gate (to block or barricade roads is a no-no that calls down riot cops), but there’s a guard house at the border.
“None for me?” Dead Eyes has a knife smile on a clean shaven face, flat. The eyes with no spark dominate, and it’s off a cliff to his chin. The man is too-tall, like a pack of jackals in a human suit and Fed windbreaker.
“Hoping you won’t be here long enough to need refreshment, officer?” The preacher stretches the last word, and takes a long, lazy savory sip of his coffee. “Mmm, perfect.
“Call me Cliff.” Ok, Officer Cliff. “Just Cliff. How long I’m here depends on you all.”
“Classic cop cliché.” I know right? Sorry. “What is it you think we have done here?” Preacher gestures back at his home, the crowd-not-crowd of people trying not to clump on the edge of ear shot.
“It’s a question of who might be among you. Will you walk with me?” Dead eyes steps aside, extends an arm in invitation. Preacher hesitates.
An old timer being nosy shouts: “Don’t go nowhere with ’em, man.”
“You have my word, you will not be detained.” And the preacher walks down the road a-ways with Dead Eyes “Thanks, it’s hard to speak honestly with an audience. You’re harboring fugitives.” The hell we are. “Jane? One Jane Iter?” Haven’t seen her, very concerned. “Ok, if you wanna bullshit, I know she made it home. I watched the drone feed.
Preacher stops. The Dead Eyed not-a-cop is no longer policing his own face. The Preacher is pretty sure he’s looking at the devil. ‘Cliff’ produces a phone, the holo-display shows the gore at the foundry–the bodies mangled, contorted, and torn by Cliff and two others.
“The man she brought into your home? He did this.” Silence. “Reverend.” Preacher, actually. “Ok, Preacher. She’s in danger, all of you are in danger.”
The Preacher nods, sets his feet beneath his shoulders. Preaches to the man with no light in his eyes: “When I was a kid my older brother ran a weed dispensary out in California.” What’s this got to do. “Everything. See he and his partner ran inside state law, but before Fed legalization.” Okay. “Feds kicked in the door. Shot the dog. Took everything.” I’m sorry that happened. “Then they did it again and again again” Your point?
“I don’t fucking trust you, and for all I know, you did that.” Preacher jabs a finger at the holo, and when Dead Eyes grins and almost-Kubrick-Leans the minister is certain he’s looking at the devil–not literary Lucifer but all the cunning and viciousness and some kind of power.
“Ok then. You need to produce these people, or” That’s a conspicuous pause. “Or we can barricade the road and cordon the place and search house by house, room by room.” Are you fuckin’ kidding me? “Would you prefer we wait until dead of night, and I come get them.”
Preacher maintains game face, pivots. “Threats of violence are bad faith.” He walks back toward the town, trying not to shake. “Your fugitives are not here, friend.”
*
A few years back in Chicago, the kid’s come back from puking and brushing her teeth and dad’s got a glass of water for her and a bit more story in him tonight. She’s calm and ‘ok’ and the worry backs away from him enough to keep weaving. He waits, as he always does, for her.
“Glenn and Jane Eyre are trapped.” She’s pale and sweaty and back from the dream.
“They are. Glenn the Golem.” Nope, Knight now. “Really?” Yes, and a kah-noble ka-night. “That’s not how they said it in the olden…” You weren’t there. You don’t know.
The Judge surrenders and continues: “The Knight Glenn” Who is also a golem. “Who is also a golem. He was still remembering himself and how to be a knight, and what a knight was supposed to do.” Protect people. “Yes, but which people?” Jane Eyre, he has to protect her.
“Yeah, but she found him by accident. And she only needed saving that once. She liked her life. All the lords and ladies in Castle Town liked their castles. But they all knew that-sooner-not-later, all the king’s horses and men and hounds and worse would come for glen.” What’s worse than mean-ass dogs? “Language, child. Monsters in the shape of men, beasts with dead eyes.”
“Did Glenn even do anything wrong?” The kid props herself on an elbow, frowning intently.
“He landed in the kingdom. He had the audacity to fall from the sky.” That’s all? “Kings are proud, my girl. And if he broke no law, defied no code. For a little while, he shined brighter than the King’s crown.”
*
NARRATIVE NOW: SQUATTERSVILLE, PA/CHICAGO, IL
*
“Dude, you guys gotta go.” Committees and meetings and meetings all day, and the rumor mill(s) that roar–that make the commune-of-commune function in good times. It’s been a long day, and Shim wears it on her face.
“I know, we boogie after dark.” Boogie? “Yeah, leave. Vamoose. Scram. Get the fug-outta-Dodge.” It’ll be out the place and north walking calmly with hoods down (for the drones) down long suburban streets through empty-ish neighborhoods and past overgrowing parks and in a group of definitely not 2 toward a house and some friends-of-friends and a ride to Ohio to lay low.
And it might have worked if not for the robot dogs.
They’re awful–with the buggy biometric facial recognition software and the “papers please” demand to kneel down so the robotic menace can scan you. God help you if you don’t comply quick enough. They’re far faster than a human and each one comes programmed with a flow-chart-toward-the-use-of-force.
Jane and Glenn are trapped.
*
CHICAGO, IL (LATE NIGHT/EARLY MORNING)
*
“In light of recent events we’re accelerating our timeline.” The chairman of the ‘Hole Committee” addresses his four remaining colleagues. He is a disembodied ghost holo in the Judge’s study. The thing, the too sharp display that promises a headache later. “Each of you will retrieve your entry packet and passes. You will follow the included instructions to the letter.”
The Judge is tired. Presses at the pressure point at the bridge of his nose hard as he can, dons his glasses and squints at the chairman’s holo. He interrupts: “Are we being liquidated?”
“Excuse me, your honor?” The old spy is taken aback.
Judge takes a swig of his drink. “I’m asking what we’ve been thinking, since Winchester.” He was a traitor. “Yes, and Pharos and Kings and Emperors had tombs lined with the corpses of loyal servants.”
“Damnit, Jim. That’s not what this is, and these holes are not tombs.” The Chairman sighs and considers, straightens his tie. “We’re not doing the liquidating.” Winchester? “His reach extends beyond the grave. There’s your little Pharo. Please understand the need for haste, and my sincere concern for your safety.”
*
Somewhere between Peoria and Chicago, a red-and-rust Chevy sits out back of a roadside motel with good water pressure. In a room like every other room in every other roadside motel that’s ever been, the assassins pray and assemble weapons and consume hallucinogens and pray some more. They purify themselves for the last leg, the road north to Chicago.
*
END FOUNDRY(5)