Desolation Road

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.”

Mr. Jericho pounded a fist into the palm of his other hand in the supposed fashion of one in deep thought. He was consulting with his Exalted Ancestors, rifling their stored personas for ancient insights.

“Blessed Lady! I know! Child of Grace, the time machine! The mark two Alimantando time winder. Holy God, the final weapon.”

Bootsteps crunched on the dirt outside. Shhing and hushing, the curfew breakers extinguished their candles and crept away through the web of tunnels and caves to their fearful beds.

On the twelfth day of the occupation Arnie Tenebrae set about her preparations for battle. Loudspeaker vans liberated from the Company announced that all citizens above the age of three were conscripted into the universal labour force and gave times and places of muster. Under the field-inducers of the 14th and 22nd Engineering Corps, the people were set to digging revetments into the cliffs, laying a circular minefield all around Desolation Road at the inner edge of the Crystal Lands, and constructing a maze of trenches, bunkers, dugouts and foxholes from which defenders could command fields of fire along Desolation Road’s eccentric street plan. The sun rose to siesta height, but the universal labour force worked on, for the liberation had freed the day from the tyrannical siesta. There were faintings, there were collapsings, there were sluggish dragging and dropping of tools. A fat sweaty hotel owner called Marshall Cree set down his shovel and refused to work anymore. Two guards from the Corps of Engineers came and led him away. Half an hour later his severed hands were displayed on a sharpened tree branch and taken around the workings for all to see. If he would not use his hands for the Army of Liberation, he would not use them at all. At 13 minutes of 13, when even in winter the sun tipped its crucible of molten heat over Desolation Road, the two guards from the Corps of Engineers came for Genevieve Tenebrae.

“Oh no no no no, not me, please!” she screamed, flailing and kicking so hard it seemed her ancient cardboard bones must snap. The guards took her not to the amputation block, but to her own house, where her daughter awaited her.

“Hello, Mother,” said Arnie Tenebrae. “Are you well? Good. Just called to say hello.” Genevieve had always been slightly afraid of her stolen daughter. Whenever she heard her daughter’s name on the radio in connection with some new atrocity, she had told herself that Arnie was a Mandella, yes, not her flesh and blood at all, because of the fear. Now the sight of her battle-armoured and demon-painted daughter terrified her.

“I really wanted to give my regards to my mother and father, but they’re dead, and so is my brother, and so is my nephew. And no one thought to tell me.”

“What do you want?” asked Genevieve Tenebrae.

Arnie let her gaze roam judgmentally over the sordid room, untidy with neglected bric-a-brac and the little forgetfulnesses of an old crazy woman. Her eyes came to rest upon the blue bubble on the filthy mantelpiece. It was suspended above something that looked like a sewing machine tangled up in spider silk. Inside the iso-informational field her adoptive father still turned blue somersaults. He no longer spoke. After twelve years of solitary confinement there was nothing for him to say. Arnie Tenebrae’s lips brushed the blue bubble.

“Hello, Daddy. I’ve come to set you free, like you set me free.” The controls of the time winder were similar to the wrist sets of the field-inducers; not surprisingly, for the Whole Earth Army weapons had been modelled on Dr. Alimantando’s designs. She smiled as she set the verniers to zero.

“Good-bye, Daddy.”

The blue bubble popped, an implosion of air. Her father’s ghost was gone.

She gave the time winder to Major Dhavram Mantones of the elite 55th Strategic Engineering Group.

“Make it work for me, Dhav,” she said, then went to watch the progress of the construction. She liked to walk along the trenches and revetments and play heroes and demons in her head.

Dhavram Mantones was back first thing next morning.

“It can’t be done,” he declared, “The best I can achieve is a localized temporal stability field.”

“If Dr. Alimantando can do it, you can do it, Dhav,” said Arnie Tenebrae, glancing out of the window of her Steeltown headquarters as if to emphasize the fleetingness of time. “If you need help, get Mr. Jericho, Rajandra Das and Ed Gallacelli. They worked on the original time winder. We should be able to persuade them.”

The instrument of persuasion was a device called Charley Horse. It was nothing more than a triangular billet of metal, apex upward, suspended a metre and a half above the floor. It was equally simple in operation. The person to be persuaded was stripped, hands bound to a beam above the head to encourage secure seating, and placed astride the metal billet. A few hours of Charley Horse was enough to persuade the most recalcitrant of riders. Mr. Jericho and Rajandra Das did not even require a minute’s persuasion.

“We don’t know anything more than you do.”

“What about Ed Gallacelli?”

“He’s dead.”

“Might he have told his dear wife?”

“Might have, but she’s left. Flown away.”

“Then who might know?”

“Limaal Mandella.”

“Don’t be clever. He’s dead too.”

“Maybe Rael, then. Limaal passed a lot of Dr. Alimantando’s secrets to Rael Jr.”

“We know. We didn’t find anything in the notebooks. Or in the house.”

“Maybe you should ask him personally. Limaal might have told him something not in the books.”

“Indeed he might.”

To Rael Mandella Jr., virtual recluse since the murder of his father and the disappearance of his aunt and his Pyrrhic victory over the Company, came the surprise invitation for a ride on Charley Horse. He was not appreciative of the treat; after only four hours he was removed in a near comatose state by which time Arnie Tenebrae was convinced anyway that he knew nothing of the inner arcana of Dr. Alimantando’s chronokinetic arts. She did obtain one piece of information from him that earned him his reprieve: that all Dr. Alimantando’s secrets, including the mystic Temporal Inversion that made chromodynamism possible, were somewhere on the walls of his house. Dhavram Mantones was dispatched to take a closer look at the frescoes on pain of a permanent visit to Charley Horse. Rael Mandella Jr. was cut down and taken back to his family home. A pity Arnie Tenebrae would quite have enjoyed leaving him there to see if he could beat the current thirty-hour record for horseback riding.

Rael Mandella Jr. was taken delirious into his grandmother’s kitchen, where she and his own mother tended him and put him to bed. There he hallucinated that he had once had a father made from maple and a mother made from flowers and bean cans. He lay thus for three days and a neighbour’s daughter, a shy girl called Kwai Chen Pak who had assisted Santa Ekatrina in the soup kitchen days, brought him flowers and pretty stones and from the scanty rations made him candy kangaroos and raisin-bread men. At the end of this time he awoke to learn two important things. The first was that he desperately loved Kwai Chen Pak. The second was that in the night the host of the Parliamentarians had settled around Desolation Road in readiness for the last battle.