“You’re looking well, Johnny.” She checked her wrist gauges: 85 percent charge. Good. She circled to her left. Johnny Stalin circled to her right. Both watched for the tell-tale moment when the other’s canopy went down in the instant before firing. Arnie Tenebrae circled, waited. The air grew stale within her defence canopy.
“Oh, Johnny,” she said again, “remember, there’s a dozen of them waiting for you if you get past me.” She fired, plunged for cover. Stalin’s return fire was slow slow slow. Arnie Tenebrae had all the time in the world to turn, aim, and punch a force-field fist through his lowered canopy that smashed him apart like an egg.
Commander Tenebrae had her men search through the smoke and the rubble for some souvenir of Johnny Stalin that she might add to her collection of trophies, but they found only pieces of charred machinery. Then trooper Jensenn brought Arnie Tenebrae Johnny Stalin’s head and she sat for a long time laughing at the wires and the complex articulated aluminium joints that served for cervical vertebrae.
“A robot,” she laughed. “An olly-o, jolly-o robot.” She tossed the head away and laughed and laughed and laughed so long and so hard that it began to scare the soldiers of Group 19.
60
Dominic Frontera was first to learn that the liberation of Desolation Road was actually an occupation and that all the rejoicing citizens who had carried the Whole Earth Army guerrillas shoulder high through the alleys were hostages to Arnie Tenebrae’s dream of Gotterdammerung. He learned this at six minutes of six in the morning when five armed men took him from the cellar of Pentecost’s General Merchandise Store, where he had been held incommunicado and stood him against the brilliant white wall. The soldiers drew a line in the dust and stood him behind it.
“Any last requests?” said Captain Peres Estoban.
“What do you mean, last requests?” said Dominic Frontera.
“It’s customary for a man facing a firing squad to be granted a last request.”
“Oh,” said Dominic Frontera, and voided his bowels into his nice white ROTECH uniform. “Um, can I clean up this mess?” The firing squad smoked a pipe or two while the mayor of Desolation Road dropped his pants and made himself presentable. Then they blindfolded him and put him back in front of his wall.
“Firing party, shoulder arms, firing party, aim, firing party… firing party… Child of grace, what now?”
While feeding the chickens, loyal but unintelligent Ruthie had seen the soldiers take her husband and stand him against a wall and point weapons at him. She emitted a cry like a little astonished bird and chased pell-mell, helter-skelter all the way across to the mayor’s office to arrive just as Peres Estoban was mouthing the order to fire.
“Don’t kill my husband,” she shrieked, throwing herself between executioners and executionee in a welter of flying arms and skirts.
“Ruthie?” whispered Dominic Frontera.
“Madam, out of my way,” ordered Peres Estoban. Ruthie Frontera stood solid, a drab Valkyrie with fat legs. “Madam, this is a legally constituted Revolutionary Firing Party executing its legally constituted sentence. Please move out of the line of fire. Or,” he added, “I will have you arrested.”
“Huh!” said Ruthie, “Huh huh huh. You’re pigs you are. Let him go.”
“Madam, he is an enemy of the people.”
“Sir, he is my husband and I love him.” There was a flash of light that even Dominic Frontera could see through his blindfold as Ruthie Frontera nee Blue Mountain discharged in one intense moment twelve years of accumulated beauty. She swept her charisma beam across the firing party and each soldier in turn gibbered as the full potency of her loveliness came to focus on him and they dropped, eyes wide open, mouths trickling froth. Ruthie Frontera freed her husband and that same morning escaped with aged father and as much of a household as they could fit into the back of a purloined Bethlehem Ares Steel trunk.
They smashed through the Steeltown perimeter wire and drove out into the land of Crystal Ferroids and were never seen again in Desolation Road. It was commonly suspected that they perished in the Great Desert from madness caused by drinking radiator water. This was far from so. Dominic Frontera and his family reached Meridian and were posted to pleasant and peaceful Pine Rapids in the Sinn Highlands, where there were tall trees and clean air and gently splashing waters. He lived there very happily as mayor until one day a visitor for the winter season recognized his wife and his father-in-law from another place and another time and told him how his wife had been mixed together like a cocktail in a Genesisory by a crazy man who hated wives but loved children.
After that Ruthie Frontera no longer seemed so beautiful to the mayor of Pine Rapids, but that may not have been the fault of the gossip so much as her father, who in designing her had cursed her that she might only exercise her power of beauty three times and then it would be gone forever. So in saving Dominic Frontera from the firing squad, Ruthie had lost his love and that is an old old story.
The executive directors of the Steeltown project alas did not have a Ruthie to save them by love. Over a period of ten days they were taken in batches of five and blasted to pieces by the field inducers of Arnie Tenebrae’s Army of Liberation. The representatives of the media were brought at gunpoint to witness and record the glorious executions of the despots, but they had all of them long before reached the conclusion that Desolation Road and its people were hostages to Arnie Tenebrae’s improvisations with Marya Quinsana.
Curfew was imposed and strictly enforced. Pass cards were issued for walking in the street and rationing introduced. Goods trains were stopped up the line at the edge of the Crystal Zone, driven into Desolation Road, and systematically looted. All food was the property of the Revolutionary Directorship and theoretically pooled to be shared equally among all, but Desolation Road was hungrier than it had ever been even in the hungriest days of the strike. The lion’s share went into the mouths of the two thousand troops occupying the town and citizens, steelworkers, pilgrims, Poor Children, reporters, goondahs and bums subsisted on lentils and rice. Mr. Peter Iposhlu, a market gardener under the Mandella/Gallacelli land agency, refused to surrender his crop to the Whole Earth Army and was hanged from a cottonwood tree. Alba Askenazy, a harmless and well-regarded beggar, tried to steal a salami from the Revolutionary Commissary and received identical treatment. Rajandra Das had to beg for ration vouchers from his clientele to continue the Hot Snack and Savouries end of the business while the Bar/Hotel, under Kaan Mandella’s caretakership, was forced to post “Closed Until Further Notice” signs in the window for the first time in popular memory. After curfew, however, its cellars were bright with the candles of counter-revolutionary mice.
“Just what does she want from us?” asked Umberto Gallacelli.
“She says she wants to draw the Parliamentarians in after her for a final big battle,” said Mr. Jericho.
“Child of Grace!” said Louie Gallacelli. “How do you know that?”
“Talking to the soldiers,” said Mr. Jericho unconvincingly.
“I think she wants to get her own back on us all,” said Rajandra Das. “She thinks we ran her out of town, so now she’s going to make us pay. Golddigging bitch.”
“Revenge then?” suggested Umberto Gallaceili.
“I think there’s something here she wants,” said the Amazing Scorn, voice a hushed whisper, throaty and cancerous. He had burned his throat out on the day of deliverance in Corporation Plaza, his power had overreached itself. He could never be sarcastic again. “When she captured us in Chryse, she seemed as if she wanted us alive for some reason, something to do with this place.”