In my trek west across the depopulated wastelands of America, I’d seen some pretty impressive landmarks--most of them the remains of disasters dating back to the Collapse. Like the multi-train wreck just outside the ruin of Chicago, in which any freight containers that had not buckled from the original impact had given way since to the crowbars of looters. Or the 500 car pileup on the now-crumbling Interstate 55/64 interchange near the St. Louis Crater, the bleached bones of their former passengers scattered by carrion-eaters for acres in all directions. And speaking of skeletons, how about that blackened carcass of a Boeing 797 smeared across the flank of a mesa in the Dakota Badlands? No human remains to be found around that one, though--they’d all burned to a cinder when the plane did its swan-dive into terrain some twenty years ago.
Compared to those colossal wrecks, the landmark I now confronted looked like a homely, homespun little sideshow. A misshapen weather-bleached mound of trash the size of a small house, straddling the cracked and heaved two-lane blacktop leading into what had once been a national park. It wasn’t until you got a little closer that you realized there really was a small house under all that flotsam and jetsam. It was, in fact, the gatehouse to the old park.
You had to get right up close to it to realize all that garbage had not just been randomly dumped on the gatehouse, but deliberately hung all over it.
Thousands and thousands of pieces of trash, evidently hung with care by persons unknown traveling through all this dangerous country to reach this remote place. And there were certain themes among the items with which the house had been festooned. ID tags were one recurring motif. Driver’s licenses, company keycards, government IDs, police badges, military dog-tags, relocation camp dog-tags, hospital wristbands, plague triage wristbands, coroner’s toe-tags--all of them with dates from before the Collapse (by the time the Collapse had gotten rolling in earnest, nobody had time to keep up with the coroner’s tags anymore). Credit cards were big too, as were such pre-Collapse technocrap as cell phones, pagers, digital music players, PDAs, cameras--all totally useless since the infrastructure on which they had depended had risen up to strangle their original inventors.
And there were tee-shirts bearing the names of destroyed cities and universities, of extinct athletic teams and musical groups . . . flags of states and nations which, if they still existed at all, were now only impotent illusions maintained by handfuls of damaged diehards in isolated bunkers . . . newspaper and magazine clippings moldered away to illegibility . . . the occasional street and highway sign, including a prominently displayed marker for Haight Street (wonder what had become of the one for Ashbury?). And then there were the dolls. The dolls were especially eerie. All those eyes following you . . . And it hurt to think what probably had become of the children who had once played with them.
This was the celebrated Phantom Tollbooth, as it was called (among many other names) by the people for whom it stood as portal to their homeland, symbol of their liberty, and middle finger raised in defiance at their former species-mates. It meant I had finally reached the boundary of Freak Nation, refuge of those who, having finally gotten sick and tired of homo sapiens’s genocidal and suicidal shit, decided to abandon us to our fate and withdraw into the wilderness. And then the Collapse hit, and we became too busy fighting off our imminent extinction to come after them. And so things had remained until now.
I left my bike standing in the slot of afternoon sunlight that fell between the wall-like stands of trees lining the road on either side, so that the bike’s solar paint could soak up as many of the day’s remaining photons as possible. Gravel and forest litter crunched under my sandals as I approached the Tollbooth’s shaggy flank. The only other sounds were birdsong, the faint rustling of the wind in the trees, and the even fainter creak and sigh of my exoskeleton.
Close-up, the rotting layers of garbage cloaking the Tollbooth gave out a not-unpleasant odor of compost. There were splotches of mold, clumps of moss and fungus, ferns and bracken, even the occasional fir sapling sprouting out of its flanks and crown. Nobody ever bothered to prune the poor thing--and its owners liked it that way. The Tollbooth, and the offerings left upon it, were sacrosanct. Once something was hung on it, even by Mother Nature, nobody was to disturb it.
It wasn’t quite clear who first came up with that rule, but Head Net had definitively established who started the custom of hanging mementos on the old gatehouse. That honor went to a wild-eyed young lupine Freak who went by the handle of SupaDupaBitch, fresh from a harrowing journey back to her pre-Collapse hometown of Oakland. Ol’ SDB had gone there to see if she could find any member of her family still alive after all the chaos, only to discover of course that her quest was hopeless. Worse, she nearly got herself killed for her troubles when she was jumped by a vigilante party of deranged Straights (one of the more polite things the Freaks call us homo sapiens).
Escaping, she resolved that would be the last opportunity she would ever give Straight society to fuck with her. And when at last she passed the Phantom Tollbooth again on her way homeward bound, she ripped her precious Raiders shirt from her back, hung it on the Tollbooth’s front door, shucked the remainder of her clothes and heaved them into the woods, and sallied forth clad only in the fur that covered her hide, swearing she would never again let any symbol of Straight society so much as touch her Freaky ass.
She was by no means the first to go fur-clad--after all, nudism was only natural for those Freaks who had sprouted their own fur coats. But SDB’s simple spontaneous gesture of hanging that symbol of her former human affiliation out to dry touched a nerve among the collective Freakdom. Suddenly it was a rite of passage for every Freak passing the Tollbooth on their way home to the Motherland to post there some souvenir of the vanished world of the Straights.
Well, I was no Freak, and Freak Nation was not my home. But I had a little memento of my own family’s history that I’d brought all these thousands of miles to bestow on this monument.
I reached in my pouch and pulled out yet another pre-Collapse ID tag, this one a dog-eared press pass, and studied one last time the photo embedded in the plastic. As always, it was like looking into a strange mirror and seeing an alternate-universe version of myself, about ten years older and a good hundred pounds heavier ... and a whole different gender and orientation. "Godspeed, Dad,” I told the photo, and carefully hung the tag over a clump of other tags.
“And just who the fuck gave you permission to hang that on our gate, Straight?”
I whirled to find a big burly ursine Freak standing between me and my bike, regarding me with obvious hostility. He stood a good seven feet tall, and his shaggy fur made him look like he was about four feet wide. But I didn’t mind that--what troubled me was that I had not heard him approach. Sloppy, sloppy. Was I already letting myself be lulled into a false sense of security by Head Net’s gentle omnipresence? And where the hell were the Heads, anyway?
<<No worries, brah, we’re watching,>> a lilting voice spoke within my head. <<We just didn’t want to interrupt your little personal moment there.>>
Head Net, checking in on Head Standard Time as usual. Fine, be that way.
I looked my interlocutor up and down and said, “And who are you to say who has permissions around here?”
His eyes glared red from under bristling brows. “Someone who has the right to be here. Unlike you, you fucking Straight.”
I rolled my eyes. “Now come on, I know that you know who I am, and that I was invited--“
“Fuck that shit. And fuck the assholes who invited you. You’re a fucking Straight, and Straights have no business setting foot on our land, so you can put your skinny little diseased cyborg ass on your piece-o-shit techno bike and just ride the fuck back where you came from.”
“Dude,” I said lightly, shifting on the balls of my feet, “you do realize you’re making a lot of assumptions about me, right? For one thing . . . I may not be a Freak, but if there’s one thing I am, it sure as hell ain’t Straight.”
“The fuck are you talking about?” he growled, curiosity piqued in spite of himself. But before I could elaborate, Head Net checked in again, this time more forcefully.
<<Shadrach,>> the mellow disembodied voice addressed my adversary, <<quit being a fucking asshole. You know this traveler is under protection of the Tribal Council.>>
“Yeah, well, this ain’t the first time the Council’s been full of shit. And I know my rights--”
<<Your rights, in this situation, extend to expressing your opinion, of which you are doing an admirable job. But to threaten or block the passage of a traveler under the protection of the Council, that you have no right to do. Now lay off, or we’ll be forced to take appropriate action.>>
“Well, you and the Council and your fucking ‘appropriate action’ can all go fuck yourselves.” But the wind was already leaking out of Shadrach’s sails; he knew he was beat. The Heads were watching his every move and mood now; if he so much as thought about doing me harm, they would shut him down before he had a chance to form a second thought.
I held up my hands in a sign of appeasement. “Never fear, I was just about to be on my way anyhow, as soon as I retrieve my bike.”
“Fuck that. Until I see you taking your fucking skinny ass off our land, you’re still in deep shit as far as I’m concerned.” But he did step out of the path between me and my bike. Only by a few feet though. And then he stopped, and glowered, daring me to walk by him. Charming. My experience with hostile Freaks might still be a little thin, but apparently wounded machismo is just the same across all sentient species. Guess I’d have to teach him the lesson he was so clearly demanding.
<<Hell, brah, you’re good,>> murmured Head Net in the back of my brain. <<You don’t even need telepathy to read where this dude is coming from.>>
Yeah, well, I’ve been around the rodeo a few times myself, I thought back at them.
<<Cool. We think we let you handle this one. You look good for it.>>
Shadrach was now making a big show of studiously ignoring me--but had not moved an inch from his position. Fine, whatever. I squared my shoulders and prepared to walk past the big lunk.
I’ll give him this--he was faster than he looked. He actually succeeded in laying a hand on my shoulder. But I too am much faster than I look--and much stronger too. Within seconds he had landed on his back with a resounding thump a few meters away. I heard the gasp as the impact knocked the wind out of his lungs. I was already astride my bike and kicking the power plant into action before he pulled himself up to a sitting position; he sat there, shaking his head to clear it, too addled to formulate any further expletive-laden tirades.
“Sorry it had to come to this,” I said cheerfully. “But perhaps next time we meet you’ll remember that I don’t need Head Net to protect my skinny little ass.”
And I kicked the bike into gear, gave Shadrach and the Tollbooth a wide berth, and continued on my way deeper into the park, deeper into the heart of the Freakdom.
Recent Comments