by Synne Christian
Part Two:
There is a knock at the door.I freeze, boinker cocked and pointed, waiting for Billy to give the word. Waiting. Waiting for Billy.
"Ask who it is," says Billy.
"Who is it?" I say, and the door explodes inward, under a steady tidal wave of gunfire and neural stun-beams.
There's a nixon named Richard lying dead at my feet. Somebody's idea of a joke. The joke being the fact that he's named Richard, not the fact that he's dead. The dead part was my idea.
And dead ain't the half of it. The wind is hot, blowing sand into my mouth, my nose, my eyes.
"Sure, Billy!" I yell into the blasted desert, more for effect than anything else, since all I really had to do was think in a certain way, and Billy could hear me just fine.
"Sure Billy, sending other nixons after me now, I get it---can't send anyone to bust me out of jail, but you can send 'em now to kill me!" I give Richard's corpse a good hard kick. "Well, fuck you, Billy! You hear me? You're a dead man, Billy!"
I bend down and set in to drag Dick out of sight.
Out of sight means more than just out of mind. They've got at least a dozen ways to see me. Billy knows that even better than I do. Satellite surveillance, radar, and underground listening posts to name just a few. And I'd be willing to bet that there's more than a few tracking device implants hidden somewhere deep inside of me. They don't like to take chances.
Not to mention the fact that Billy sees everything that I do. I learned pretty quick not to look at road signs or town names. Monuments or landmarks. Gotta keep off the beaten trail, as the man says.
The desert here is littered with broken factories and Joshua trees. The sand has been baked into rock, and even melted into glass in some places. A sort of unnatural tarmac, as far as the eye can see. And it is hotter than hell.
Hot enough to burn the skin right off of your body, if you're not careful. Blister it and dry it until it cracks and peels right off. Gotta keep covered, keep out of that blaring Sun. Damn thing will burn the paint off a car, and make the air all but impossible to breathe. Not so unbearable at night, but by noon things started to catch fire, and random explosions mark the day. Better to be indoors. If not, then completely covered, and at the very least, and if the sweat doesn't drown you, and the heatstroke doesn't hit, then you might just get where you're going, hopping from one patch of shade to the next, and guzzling your carefully guarded water.
But that's for the crazy, the desperate.
I may be a fugitive, a wanted man, but one thing that I'm not, is crazy or desperate. I've got my wits, and I keep my cool. Never lose my head, Billy taught me that much, and that's why he's so damned scared of me, now.
A Joshua tree dies just like a person dies. It just sort of leans over and succumbs to the heat. Lying down, not standing up, like other trees in other places.
The desert out here looks like a battlefield, a hundred dead soldiers, cactus-branch arms outstretched, wrinkled and dry, black and burned into the sand. Only shadows, really. Shadows and ash. Dick makes a nice addition. A few more hours under old Sol, and no one would be able to tell him from just another burned up Joshua tree.
I pull my hood tighter and wipe the sweat that's dripping from my chin. The sun hurts my eyes, even through my shades, and I put up my hand to cover them.
Dick had jumped me right in front of the Excellent Diner, just outside of the industrial park.
He snuck up quick behind and poked me in the ribs, all professional, just like I would've done.
"It's over now, Johnny," he whispers hot in my ear. "They say you're all fucked up now. They say Billy---"
I managed to twist slightly and pull the trigger of my boinker, under my jacket, blowing a hole through the bottom of its holster, through my jacket and through the front of Richard's boot. Then I brought up my fist, hard, and smashed the daylights out of Dick's nose.
Then I brought up my other arm, the one that I keep hand-cuffed to my briefcase, and swing it up and around snaking the chain under his chin and around the back of his neck. I use this leverage to hunch him over, and then get a good bowling ball grip with my thumb and forefinger right in the eyes. I take a quick look around to see if anyone has noticed us, and then turn and walk Dick around to the back of the diner.
I loose the chain of my cuffs, and take hold of Richard's boinker where it's fastened down at his belt. I give him a good hard shove and the gun pulls free. He stumbles backwards, blind, into a smoldering pile of garbage next to a rusted dumpster, and his arms fly up in front of him, shielding his mutilated face.
"No," he begs me, blood running from his eyes and bubbling from his mouth. He tries to stand up.
"What's your name?" I ask, kicking him under the chin to keep him down.
"Please..."
"I said, what's your name?!" I'm hollering now.
"Richard," he says, "My name is Richard. I'm a nixon, too. I---"
"I want you to give Billy a message for me Richard." He stops blubbering. "I want you to tell him something for me."
"What?" he asks, all quiet, like maybe he really doesn't know. His eyes are filled with blood, but I'm hoping that Billy can see me through them. See me glaring. See me laughing. I empty the clip of his own boinker into his face, decapitating him. I toss him into the dumpster and head into the diner.
"When I woke up, I was in jail," I tell to the guy next to me at the counter. "And they were still fighting the fires in Newark, for miles around where the airport had been."
"Oh yeah?" says the guy. He seems interested in my story, but shows no signs of recognition or intimate knowledge---nothing to bring me any closer to Billy.
"Yeah." I sip my coffee. "I came to and I was a mess. Couldn't walk, arms broken, full of holes, the works. They really did a number on me."
"That right?" says the guy.
"Yeah," I say. "The trial was over and done with in a matter of days---I wasn't even conscious for it. It was Federal, you know, so I didn't even need to be present---and when I woke up I was looking at a good ten to twenty years."
"For blowing up an airport?" asks the guy.
"Yeah. You know, it was Federal."
"Not bad," the guy smiles and shakes his head.
"So I wake up and there I am in the fuckin' zoo, and I ask Billy what's what. He says to just hold tight, that he's working on it, but that I'm going to have to be patient.
"So I sat back and rested up. Got all healed, worked myself back into shape, and all the while Billy was making it sound like a much needed vacation. Me, I just sort of got myself into a routine."
The guy nods, "Sure pal, a routine." He gulps a mouthful of tepid coffee. "Sure, I know what you mean."
I twist my neck, cracking it loudly, and glance out the window at the endless desert of black, burnt sand littered with broken hulking piles of rusted, industrial garbage. Machines that would never work again, but would never completely fall apart. Permanent fixtures of the desert, eternally melting under the ultraviolet, crimson inferno that the Sun poured through the unfiltered atmosphere of the American mid-West.
I glance back at the guy, and push my shades further up on my blistered nose. The skin there is dry and cracked, tan almost to the point of brown, and oily with months of soaked-in spit and sweat. I sip my coffee.
"Then Billy comes back with the bad news," I say. "Fifteen years, he tells me, If you're lucky. Well Billy, I said, That's no good. And he says that there is nothing that me or anyone else could do about it."
"They couldn't bust you out?" asks the guy. "Your friends. The nixons."
"That's what I said," I say. "Billy, I said, send over a couple of nixons and get me the hell outta here. Sorry, Johnny, he tells me, but we just can't risk it. We can't take the chance of exposing the program."
"Program?" asks the guy, right on cue.
"I'm getting to that," I tell him. "But this is where it gets crazy. Soon as I was back in shape, I decided to go over the wall myself---to hell with waiting for Billy. It seemed easy enough. There was a guard that worked a certain shift. I'd just break his neck, no problem, and then I'd have a gun. The next morning, I would pull it on the guard with the keys. Take him hostage, work my way to the outer perimeter, kill someone with a key-card, and waltz out the front door. Simple, right?"
"Heh," the guy laughs and sips his coffee.
"So everything seems golden. I jack the lock on my cell, and reprogram it to lock when someone else goes in there looking for me. But then while I was waiting for Mr. Zoo-keeper to come around his corner, I feel that old familiar pop in my ear, and just as I set to tackle him, my head explodes with pain..."
"Hmm," the guy glances at the briefcase in my lap and I realize that I've been anxiously drumming my fingers on it. Self conscious, I stop and continue scrutinizing the man for any sign of recognition of even the smallest detail of my story. Waiting for that almost imperceptible widening of the eyes, or trembling of the fingers that will tell me that he knows something that I need to know.
"I come to and Billy says to me, You can't escape, Johnny. You're going to have to wait it out. You're gonna have to do your time... I asked him what the hell he was talking about, and he says that escape is too risky. The project has already been exposed too much."
"Project You keep mentioning---"
"I'm getting to that," I tell him. "Billy, I said, What do you mean wait it out? Do you mean I have to stay here There's no other alternative, Johnny, he tells me. There's no other choice."
"So what'd you do?" asks the guy.
"I freaked out at first, throwing myself at the walls and jumping through windows. Really crazy, out of control. But every time I tried to escape the pain got worse. Billy made the pain worse and worse. It got so I thought I was going to die, and then it got so I wanted to die.
"I began thinking crazy things. I think that the pain put crazy thoughts in my head. And sometimes the pain was there even when I wasn't trying anything. Probably just to keep me from trying something. And sometimes I think I even imagined the pain when it wasn't even really there.
"I started thinking and dreaming really strange thoughts---like maybe I would never get out of there, and maybe I would never die. Like maybe the pain would go on and on for ever. I wished that I could die. I wanted to die like Jackson had, fighting the Sighties.
"And then I thought, what if Jackson hadn't died fighting the Sighties? What if Billy had lied? What if I had killed him when I dropped the plane onto the airport? All I knew for certain was that I wanted to die more than anything else. And I even tried it once."
The guy just looks at me.
"But when I tried, Billy made the pain---so bad. And then I knew I could never kill myself, that Billy would never let me. In fact I began to believe that I could never really die at all. Death would be nothing after the pain Billy had given me.
"And that's when I knew that I'd been beaten. That was the very worst time of all."
"What did you do?"
"The only thing that I could," I say. "I was a good boy. Every night I said my prayers. Said my prayers and went to sleep."
"Prayers?"
"I prayed to Billy to get me the hell out of there, to stop hurting me. To let me live so I could finally die. Every night, I'd cry myself to sleep, and then I'd wake up and beg Billy until I was out of tears---to just please stop hurting me. And those were the times that he'd never even answer me.
"Then, when the all of tears were gone, I gave up on the begging. Then, every night the prayer was the same. Explain it to me again, Billy, I'd pray. Like in the old days. Explain it to me again. And every night, he would answer. And every night it made less and less sense.
"It's all part of a program, he would tell me, and by then I knew the words by heart. A thousand year program, to eliminate all of the subversive experiments, splinter factions, unethical science, illegal technology, and all around bad shit that was started back in 1965 when Richard Nixon gave the CIA the authority to conduct secret operations in the interest of national security without Presidential approval.
"It's a kind of cleanup program, Billy explained. A thousand year program, he would tell me over and over. A thousand year cleanup program, nixon, he would say, until I thought I'd gone mad. A thousand year program, nixon, he would tell say.
"They figured that it would take about a thousand years to undo everything that Nixon had set into motion in the sixties."
"No shit," says the guy. I shrug my shoulders.
"Twelve years, and I was finally out on good behavior. I tried busting out a couple more times, but Billy never let me." I shake my head and sip my drink. "Twelve years."
The guy shakes his head, too. "I feel for ya, pal."
"So, no sooner had they let me go, when Billy's got a job for me. Business as usual, he says. Dive right back in, Johnny-boy. A taxi cab picks me up in front of the zoo, and Billy is saying we've got to hurry up and get my equipment from my apartment, and then head back downtown. Seem's there's an outbreak of Gen X at a local supermarket. It had come in on a shipment of Brazilian mangos, and I happened to be the only nixon in the area. FEMA had it contained in the supermarket, but Billy didn't want to take any chances. Gen X is nasty stuff, and we couldn't risk a major outbreak.
"So I headed on home, while Billy filled me in on the specs, and I'll tell you, as I suited up, I felt like a new man. It was invigorating to be in action again, I was as sharp and as focused as ever, all my reflexes were on-line.
"For twelve long years, I had been waiting for just this moment. Going over and over it, in my head---in that secret, private part of my head that's mine, and mine alone---trying to imagine just how it would be. It was all that kept me going, really, those last few years. Waiting for just this moment.
"So I suited up, grabbed Sgt. Pepper, my best, baddest boinker, the one that I reserved for special occasions. I blew off twelve years worth of dust that had collected on it, and then I went to the closet, grabbed my briefcase, and flipped it open. Real casual, keeping my mind totally clear, I began to make some adjustments.
"I had totally rewired the CAE telepathy drive, and before Billy suspected a thing, I had wired in the tele-buffer. Just as Billy asked what I was doing, I set it for what I hoped was the right frequency.
"What are you doing? Billy asks me, We've got to go now! The FDA has just been called in, and the supermarket is---
"We're not going to the supermarket, Billy, I say, dropping Sgt. Pepper into my coat. I felt a pop in my head, but nothing else.
"What are you talking about? asks Billy, carefully now, The Gen X is-
"You've got it wrong, Billy, I say, I don't care about the Gen X. Another pop in my head, but still nothing else. No pain. The buffer was working.
"There is no time for this, starts Billy, but I cut him off.
"You don't understand, Billy, I say. You've got all wrong, Billy-boy. It's you I want. I'm coming for you. I'm gonna find you and I'm gonna kill you, you son of a bitch.
"And that's that," I tell the guy. "I know that the Head Office is somewhere out past the Yucca Salt Flats, but that's about it."
"And you think you're gonna find him?" asks the guy.
"Oh, I know I will," I say. "It's just a matter of time. Billy tries to talk me out of it every now and then, but he knows that eventually, I'll find him." I smile, even though I'm positive by now, that this guy can't help me. "The way I see it, I'm in no real hurry..."
| "Synne Christian believes that editors hate him--or at the very least, that they hate The 1,000-Year Nixon. "I've sent this story everywhere," he tells us. "To everyone. No one would publish it. One editor, after reading it, even went so far as to suggest that I burn my television... God, I wish that there was a show like Nixon on TV! I'd like to see Kevin Bacon play him..."" |
