<<< Back Table of Contents 29 Last Painter As he neared the end of a long life, Timmins was nearsighted and almost deaf. He looked just as he had at twenty, only now his hair was white. He sat in a stiff wooden chair with a blanket on his lap, a thick photo album balanced on top of it. He was scrutinizing a picture of a smiling blond-haired boy on a bicycle. "I knew this boy, Anton. Other people knew him too, but not like me, I don't think, not like me. We had an understanding that we never talked about, but I'm as sure of it as I am of this Earth. What am I saying? A lot surer than that. To each of us, the other was more real than anything else. That meant that any object, any reality that got in the way could be swept aside and we would be together, without effort, like the first time we met. We both knew it. We knew it from the first day. Nothing in this world could come between us, not ambition, not love of another, not even death." He slipped the photo back into the album and turned the page. He came to an image of Anton standing in a brightly colored shirt in a summer garden, smiling squint-eyed into the sun. In this photo, Anton was about twenty. Timmins took it in his frail hands. It was the day that Anton had visited him at the mental hospital, the day they'd decided to buy the house where he still lived. He grew wistful. "I begged him to stay with us, and he said no. He said it was time to cross over. I said I'd go with him, but he said no to that, too. Who am I to argue? I only wish he could have been born in a world that was worthy of him. It's taken me fifty years to finish my life's work. For him it was a few minutes, a flash in the pan." He rubbed his thumb along the photo's edge. "I have memories, of course, and even evidence. But after all these years, I can't say any more how much of it was real. I had a very flimsy grip on reality in those days. Sometimes I ask myself if I invented the whole thing. It was only with Anton's help, and as a result of his acts, that I finally came to understand who I was. And by then, he was gone." He shook his head in regret. "In a way, Anton died to make me what I am. He died so that Timmins might live. It's too convenient, really. I suppose that's why I wonder if it ever happened." He placed the photo carefully back in the album and closed the cover, folding his hands over it. Was his interlocutor still there? It didn't matter. He teased out the streamers of his thought. "There was a time in my life when I knew what everything meant. Every detail had a meaning for me that was obvious and precise. Each tile or grain of wood at Ruby's Place, a dog's fur matted down by fog on a misty morning—it was there for a reason, it was meant to be understood. Naturally, that got to be a bit distracting after a while. I'm glad those days are gone. The meanings are still there, of course, but today I hardly notice them." Gazing out the window, he fell asleep. • • • In the weeks following the raid on Anton's studio, the main subject of controversy in Portland was what had happened to him. The newspapers reported that he'd learned of the raid and taken flight. A lot of people were unsatisfied with this story, so alternative theories made the rounds. Some said that as the police closed in, he'd poisoned himself like in the movie about him. Others said that he'd been captured and was being held in a secret prison, where the authorities were reprogramming him to serve their interests. Of those who believed that he'd escaped, some insisted that he'd died later in a shootout, while others claimed that he'd taken a new identity and was living with a girl in Mexico. A brief story appeared in the Portland Oregonian about a month after the raid, but there was nothing in it to make the connection to Anton. STANDOFF ENDS IN DEATH (AP)—A fugitive vowing he would rather die than go to jail held off police for 14 hours, then killed his teen-age wife who stayed by his side and himself when officers stormed the house in a tear-gas barrage. "OK, we're checking out of here," Steven Banning, who had described himself as a "wonderful" and a "beautiful" person, told police by telephone early Sunday morning. Officers fired tear gas into the house in Brandon, Utah, about 80 miles southeast of Salt Lake City, heard two shots fired and broke into the home where they found the bodies of Banning, 19, and the woman he called his wife, Ann Vermeer, 18, inside the building. Anton would have preferred his own epitaph. After several days of high-profile appearances The New Boy Wonder disappeared from view Leaving no trace. The back of his head was last seen Vanishing from a parking lot at high speed. In the months that followed, the court case over Chaos Theory Records was settled and the company changed hands. The success of Jitterkid made the company fat and powerful, since the new band turned out to be bigger than Anton had ever been. Kliff survived as he had before, developing his network of contacts and interests. Jitterkid proved that he could recognize talent, and he became the best known promoter in Portland. He was a player in local progressive politics, and at one point a protest candidate for mayor. Vince, Blake, Cynthia and Travis revived the Psychic Rangers, going on to produce several new albums. The House of Mysticism, which people still thought of as "Anton's church," limped on for a while with its new icons, Marsha and Dan the Celestial Twins. Without Anton's repackaging as Harry Mellow, it had no hope of influencing Portland's cultural scene. Its sponsors finally saw the pointlessness of what they were doing, and the place was boarded up. It returned to being the New Jerusalem Chapel, now a Korean evangelical church. Copies of Dark Blossoms and Why Psychic Hygiene? appeared in antiquarian bookstores, along with old issues of Rebel Youth. It was Vince who recognized the value of these relics, keeping Anton's memory alive among the cognoscenti. Zombieland itself changed, becoming Asian working class. Vince's homey bookshop remained, an eccentric reminder of techno-primitive times. Becky moved in with Timmins shortly after Anton's departure. It was a gesture of solidarity among survivors, because she shared Timmins' feeling that Anton was gone for good. She wondered what she could have done to change the outcome. Perhaps her lack of sympathy for Anton had been a factor, provoking him to act rashly. Yet she was annoyed at herself for feeling guilty. "It wasn't up to me to save him from himself." Timmins could see that it upset her to be reminded of Anton's misfortune, so he produced no new paintings of Anton while she was with him. He believed their relationship would last, but after a year or so it ended in stalemate. Becky's overprotectiveness turned out to be unhealthy for both of them, and she left to marry an insect biologist. Timmins took up painting Anton again, but without the same intensity as before. In this later stage, Anton became increasingly superherolike, with hard-to-believe powers. In fact, Timmins sometimes lost track of the reality on which the myth was based. He began to feel that Anton might have been a childhood fantasy, an imaginary friend he'd finally outgrown. It helped to believe this, because he was convinced that by outliving Anton he'd betrayed his friend. He'd made peace with the world, which Anton had refused to do. Of course Anton had wanted it that way, but knowing that didn't help. So he persuaded himself that Anton, his soul brother from birth, was nothing but a dream. Over time Anton dwindled in his mind to a distant memory, a thing to be wondered about or even forgotten. As a child, it had been Anton's ambition to move through the world without a trace, to leave nothing behind. He'd almost succeeded in being forgotten after his death, and if not for Timmins, his friend and betrayer, he would have been. Yet he'd asked Timmins to "stay behind and tell my story," so Timmins did his best. Techno-primitivism had come and gone, and the whole paraphernalia of that movement, its magazines and films and styles of dress, had vanished with it. Nothing remained of Anton's meteoric career, his sudden and surprising fame. Only Timmins' canvasses gave him a legacy. He became part of Timmins' myth as the Last Painter. He was the rebel who'd appeared at the dawn of Timmins' career to warn of dark days to come. • • • To tell Anton's story, Timmins had to promote himself as a painter, something he would never have done otherwise. Becky and his former psychiatrist Dr. Dan helped him with this. As Dr. Dan had predicted while he was still at the mental hospital, the lurid bohemianism of his canvases was attractive to collectors on the East Coast. The publicity-hungry doctor helped him to make the necessary connections, and after a handful of sales, he was invited to New York for his first gallery show. Becky was an enthusiastic helper, packing up his canvases for the trip to the big city, advising him on etiquette and how to dress. On his arrival he was hailed as a "self-taught visionary." His innovations had arrived on the scene at just the right moment. Collectors, critics and established artists were all forced to rethink their own strategies. The gallery gave him an East Village studio to stay in, which belonged to a Brazilian painter who was out of town. The opening went off nicely, although he felt that he was in over his head. He knew enough to smile and let people talk. They could project whatever fantasies they wanted onto him, it would do them good. Afterwards, he went to a wine bar with some critics and curators, where they discussed post-symbolism and the body as signifier. When the party broke up, they hailed a taxi for him, but he got out after a few blocks because he preferred to walk. He followed the city sidewalks through mist and suspended rain, his long hair sticking out from beneath a tractor cap. A young man, small of stature, appeared in the otherwise deserted street. The boy had light hair and Puerto Rican features. He was whistling and gesturing from across the street to attract attention. Timmins stopped and blinked. The boy crossed the street but kept a parked car between them. He wanted a cigarette, and was holding out two dimes across the trunk of the car. "I just have Drum," Timmins told him. "Drum? Cool, great!" "If you'll wait a minute." Timmins took the pouch from his jacket pocket and set it on the trunk of the car. "You gonna roll me one?" the boy said in anguish. "Please, you have to accept my twenty cents." Timmins was already rolling. "It's no problem, really." The kid held the money under his nose. "Well, if that's what you want." He pocketed the coins. "What kind of tobacco is that?" "Just regular tobacco. You have to roll it yourself, is all. It's really strong." "Strong? Great! I need some tobacco in my lungs right now." The boy fingered a small plastic protrusion in the modeling of the hood. "Why do they put these things on here? What do they put them here for? Well, I shouldn't say too much." Timmins handed him the cigarette, then studied him for a moment from beneath his cap. The kid was about eighteen, with a thin growth on his upper lip. He was halfway attractive, and a bit crazy-looking. Timmins realized he was on some kind of drugs. The young man took off across the street without asking for a light. As he retreated he called out, "Take care of yourself, man. Don't get fucked up out here." Timmins wasn't worried. He paused to roll a cigarette for himself, put away his pouch and walked on. • • • Timmins was increasingly seen as a seer, and judged by standards all his own. Anton had pinned down the reason years ago. "It isn't easy to make paintings that come true." He'd said this after Timmins painted the car wreck that killed his family. It had been a cruel thing to say at the time, but it was the truth. Timmins had no special technique for being clairvoyant. He simply painted what was in his mind's eye, and it turned out to be a replica of something that had happened, or would happen. Sometimes it bothered him that his imagination was so precise. He would have liked to escape reality a little bit. When people spoke about the "photographic quality" of his work, they were referring not to his style, which was garish and messy, but to the way he captured details as if he'd been there. With time it became obvious that some of his canvasses had been painted in advance of real events. He tried to keep people from noticing this by painting disasters that were far in the future, but some of them came true sooner than expected. This predictive quality became known as "the Timmins signature," and it prompted a closer study of all his work. There was controversy as to why Timmins had made so many paintings of Anton at the beginning of his career. Some insisted that Anton was merely a fictional character, as Dr. Dan had once done. These same people liked to argue that the Anton paintings were Timmins' strongest work, "the creation of a raw young talent working from his heart," as opposed to the "crowd-pleasing, socially relevant later work." The opposing view was that since a number of Timmins' paintings had proven true, they should all be read in the same light, as records of real events. Unless the Anton canvasses could be shown to be an exception, it would be better to take them at face value. This led specialists to seek proofs of Anton's existence, but the argument was never settled. The period costumes, band equipment and nightclub interiors were accurately rendered. No flaws could be found. On the other hand, no albums, posters or press clippings ever surfaced to prove that Anton was real. Any documents that survived were held out of public view, as if by common consent among their owners. Over time, even the paintings themselves became hard to find. By now the global situation had begun to spin out of control, and people's attention was on other things. Timmins' fame rested not on his portrayal of a young rock star, but on his ability to paint cataclysms that became real. Though he rarely traveled outside his home state, Timmins was known internationally as the Last Painter or the Recluse Prophet. His canvasses hung in museums in Tokyo, São Paolo and Berlin. Art historians made a game of identifying events in his work such as the Calcutta Plague, the Jakarta Rebellion or the Urban Wars, which had spread throughout the world like an untreatable virus. If it could be proven that a painting had been made before the event, its value would become enormous. His portrayal of the military coup against President Giddens, in which Giddens was clearly recognizable as he was crushed by a tank, had been in a private collection when Giddens was still a little-known Southern preacher. Its value was rumored to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, yet another sign of the desperate times in which people were living. • • • The Unity Party succeeded in taking hold in the Heartland, causing functional collapse in the highway system, power grid and financial network. They first gained power in Omaha after a long battle with centrist forces, and dismantled all local government. When its chief propagandist Anne Priestly rose to become governor of Iowa, she promptly abolished her post, except for what she called "the shell of sovereignty" to be filled by the actions of volunteers. Most of the volunteers were highly motivated adherents of the Psychic Hygiene Movement, which had been taken in hand by its founder, Ethan Frump, after Anton's break with the church. Harry Mellow had been resurrected since Anton's death as a symbol of the movement. He was played by young men of all races and creeds, and it was said that he had "returned as all of us." He was known to address crowds in a hundred cities at once, each in its native language. "Talk to yourself. Talk to Harry Mellow," was a popular slogan. Reinhold was at work behind the scenes, destabilizing global politics and markets through disinformation. He played with genetics and climate change, and established Video Control World, in which people could instantly be "made famous" for bad behavior because they were always on camera. The great cities of the East and West Coasts lapsed into paranoia, just as wars and disease were causing vast numbers of immigrants to arrive from overseas. Due to overpopulation and a strained infrastructure, mob violence became common. In one city after another, martial law was declared as the only way to assure essential services. Stretched to the limit by the need to police civil society, the Army and National Guard were quickly infiltrated by Reinhold's cadres, who knew how to get things done. Back in the Heartland, the Union Party spread its vision of vigilantism, marauding gangs and chaos. Seeing that they could no longer protect their crops and families, rural people abandoned their homes. Famine set in, aggravated by a lack of resources such as fuel or spare parts. The military intervened to try to keep things running, but they were undisciplined and unloved. They were controlled now by Reinhold, and many saw them as an occupying force. They kept open certain roads and factories for their own purposes, but the rest of the land had no laws at all. Migration took place toward the two coasts, and the cities of the Heartland turned to empty shells. A few stubborn holdouts huddled together in the ruins, seeking protection against nomadic savages. There had been a worldwide economic collapse. There were too many people on the planet, and there was less energy in everyone's bones. Plants and animals were dying. It was harder to breathe. Drinking from a river was no longer possible, because all the rivers had dried up. The water had been stored away in bottles, for sale on shelves. Now even the shelves were empty. Soon people would share their concrete hell with the pigeons, rats and super-intelligent dogs that survived in it. Perhaps one day there would be lasting peace, but not until people got war out of their systems one last time. The next war would be one in which children turned on each other for no apparent reason, beating each other to death with homemade weapons, in a violence so intense that their parents would be forced into hiding. A jaded and cynical population stumbled along, more out of habit than anything, disconnected from reality. The old routines lacked all purpose, except to those who wanted to believe that things were still normal. • • • Reno grew up in a residential neighborhood that was all sweet pastels, the colors of lime and raspberry and lemon sherbet. There was an illusion of calm, of a life that had gone on unchanged since his grandmother's time. Still, the city was emptier than it had once been. The factories were crumbling, the roads were overgrown. The street outside their house hadn't been repaired in ages, and the sidewalks had cracks wide enough to grow bushes in. He sat in the living room, looking out the picture window. The scene outside the window was washed out, glaring in the bright sunlight. The lawn was dry and brown because there hadn't been enough rain to keep it green through the summer. A large white sedan sat in the driveway, a relic which they used only in emergencies, due to lack of fuel. His mother, a kind, plain-looking woman of about forty, was bending to trim the roses, which were gathered in little plots surrounded by white rocks. She wore a pastel cotton summer dress, her hair tied up in a bun. The quiet was disturbed by the sudden roar of a motorcycle. It raced onto the lawn, tearing up the dry grass. The rider wore a leather jacket and jeans. A bandana covered his face. He struck Reno's mother with a pipe, then sped away. She collapsed onto the driveway, and a bloodstain gathered there. She was breathing, but unconscious. Reno ran to her side, gently touching her face. He put her in the car and took her to the hospital, but they told him that the operation she needed was impossible. They had no medicines, no blood supplies. He watched her die in helpless fury. There was nothing now to hold him to the life he had been leading. He vowed never again to trust appearances, or to find himself in a situation where he was helpless. He would learn to survive. He drifted for a while, getting lost in the cracks of his decaying city. It was a river city on the prairie, walled in by the old Beltway. Nothing moved there any more except military vehicles. Reinforced with barbed wire and machine-gun nests, the Beltway had become the city's first line of defense. The entry points were guarded against unknown dangers, nomads and pirates and the ghosts of Indians. Inside the walls was a vast open-air market and squatter camp, where scavengers sold things like used shoes with no laces. There was a fuel depot where caravans gathered before setting off under escort. The old warehouse district by the river was crumbling, turned into an unintentional garden. Boats and trains had come there in the glory days, loaded with materials for a young nation. In the dying city center were basement ragtime bars, triple-X movies, bathhouses and talk of revolution. It was a milieu of brothels and young toughs. A few decadents and eccentrics hung on there, surrounded by wreckage of the past. Reno found himself some rooms in a brick building by the river, and decided to become a painter. He built himself an airy studio with white walls and a wood floor, a mattress in the corner, and a bathtub in the middle of the room. There was a drawing table, and works in progress on easels or stands. He made paintings of cloud scenes and fields of grain. In the same neighborhood was a bathhouse carnival in an abandoned slaughterhouse. Populated by rowdies, its stalls and aisles contained sexual mercenaries catering to all tastes. He befriended a young huckster named Kliff, who ran a shooting gallery with little toy prizes and proudly sold his body to the highest bidder. Together they frequented the Salon des Assassins, run by the Blues Singer. Her club was a gathering place for smugglers and subversives. There was a stage and a piano, a cocktail bar, a back room for back-room deals. Her piano player resembled the famous revolutionary Lenin. The talk was of gun running, drug trafficking and the porn trade. Reno was drawn to the harder types, because he could learn from them. He quickly became a tough himself, rising to dominance because he was the one with the ideas, and because of his ruthlessness. In the days of rioting, he distinguished himself with a highly organized and profitable looting scheme. Based on that success, he became the boss of a truck smuggling ring. He was now a gang leader, smuggling porn and stolen property to settlements as far away as Utah and Wisconsin. They returned with manufactured items, shirts and soap and plastic tubs. Truck smuggling was now the only lifeline connecting the former cities of the Heartland, which had become little more than squatter camps. The military was overworked, spread too thin, harried by defections. Most of the soldiers were addicts anyway, demoralized, hating and envying those on the outside. Command lines were uneven, and sometimes the troops went on a rampage, burning crops, smashing houses and taking pot-shots at fleeing families. The truck smugglers were the only ones disciplined enough to keep communication open in a terrain of unpredictable checkpoints and marauding bandits. It was easy to be generous with stolen treasure, so Reno developed a populist streak. He gave out candy to children, and turkeys at Christmas. He helped a poor widow hook up a generator, and gave her a year's worth of fuel. He sponsored fiestas at his compound, where he loaded the tables with food and gifts. He intervened in local disputes. He was on his way to becoming an independent warlord with his own private fiefdom. Kliff watched his friend's rise and cultivated it. He told Reno that he could stay at that level or form an alliance with people higher up. One day he vanished, and returned a few weeks later with news that a major operator named Reinhold had taken an interest. Reinhold was based on the West Coast, but his ambitions were international. He wanted Reno to shore up his eastern flank while he expanded across the Pacific. With Kliff as intermediary, the alliance was formed. Reno became Reinhold's front-line ally in the wasted Heartland, and Kliff went to work at his headquarters, known as the Citadel. Reno knew about the Citadel only from rumor. It was said to be a media fortress, hidden in a vast bunker in the mountains out West. Its location was known only to the faithful, and it had the capacity to suddenly disappear. Some people said you could enter it only by dreaming. Others said it wasn't real at all. When word reached the Citadel that Reno was getting restless, Kliff returned to the Heartland to check in. He arrived in a military convoy well after midnight, after a mechanical problem had delayed him near Great Bend for hours. Reno the young pornographer was there to greet him. They embraced warmly, pounding each other on the back and shoulders as their breath threatened to freeze and fall crashing at their feet. The station was lit by hurricane lanterns. "No electricity now in this part of the state," Reno commented. "No fuel to run the generators." They walked to a private car that waited with its engine running. Kliff looked at him questioningly and he shrugged. "I've managed to hold onto some of the conveniences we're both used to." They sat together in back as the driver took them through dark and icy streets to the railyards by the river. A fire burning on the sidewalk revealed a drawn, bearded face in a pile of blankets. Further on, several drifters were milling in and out of a corner house, as if preparing for a fight. When they finally pulled up in front of Reno's compound, a converted slaughterhouse at the edge of acres of unused tracks, the riot of sound and light that enveloped them felt out of place, a deliberate slap at the solemn resignation that gripped the rest of the city. Reno guided Kliff up the loading ramp with a hand on his back. Several people stood around outside, drinking and laughing. The women especially wore outfits too skimpy for midwinter, and the men stroked them to keep them warm. A blonde by the door turned from her companion, a sharp dresser with a face like a shovel, to brush her lips against Reno's ear as they squeezed past. Reno's windowless office was quiet, at the end of the building and up a flight of stairs. He gestured Kliff to a chair and closed the door, removing the heavy black overcoat he'd looted from a men's store downtown, during the days of rioting. He passed Kliff a drink and stood in the middle of the room, staring back at him with intelligent pale eyes. Kliff thought that he was balanced precariously between excellence and oblivion, as if he were about to self-destruct. As a teenager among the stampeding, panic-driven rioters, Reno had stood out for his natural grace, the ease of his violence. He had acquired a following then. He had a gift for leadership, but only in desperate times like these. He kept people guessing. They never knew whether he would offer tenderness or pain. Looking at him now, Kliff felt that the cruelty was a little more dominant than before. "Have you had a rough year?" he asked from his chair. Reno's face settled into an uncertain smile in which anger lay hidden. "Keeping an operation like this is harder than starting one." "You aren't the first person to discover that." "I've had visitors, emissaries from the other side. What I do is too successful now to be our secret. They consider this their territory. They made me an offer." "And...?" The anger was in plain view now. "I said no." Kliff met his gaze and shrugged, palms up. "We knew it would be like this. Take it as a compliment. They've started to take you seriously." He downed the brandy and held his glass out for more. "Have they moved against you yet?" "Preliminaries. Spies here at the compound, I'm pretty certain. Harassment of my people while they're out on the road. The League of Local Sheriffs is trying to set up a network to control trade between cities. Clever scheme. They let their people through, mine get picked off one by one. I could lose my best people that way." "Naturally. The lines are hardening." "I've kept things open for you east of the Rockies. I've done it almost singlehandedly. So far, I haven't asked for a whole lot in return." "Do you want to stand and fight, or do you want to withdraw to safer ground?" "Are you offering me the choice?" "Yes, we are. Denver? Flagstaff? The further you pull back, the safer it is, and the more reliable our support. But I thought you wanted it this way. Out here, it's your own show." "I do want it this way. I'm protecting my own turf. I just don't want to see good people slaughtered." "You should arm them better. Travel with guard vehicles. Those local sheriffs aren't so well equipped. A little intimidation never hurt. And stay ahead of your opponents, move into territory they haven't thought of yet. Their operation may be powerful, but it's run from the East Coast. You've got the whole middle of the country to work with. Stay ahead of them! You can be bigger than them, here on your own ground." "Nothing you've said is new." "But you wanted to hear it. We're not going to abandon an old friend. We have spies of our own, you know. Our enemies aren't invulnerable. In fact, you scare them. You have a real chance to box them in for good. But I'll warn you, before they admit they're beat, they'll throw everything they have at you. Take it as a compliment, like I said." Kliff returned to the Citadel, leaving Reno on the front lines to take the heat for Reinhold. His biggest opponent was the U.S. Army. Powerful families back East used the Army to defend their interests, but the boys on the ground had business of their own. They played both sides, policing and trafficking at the same time. One day, Reno realized that his friends at the Salon des Assassins were political, and were working actively to undermine the military. They had joined his truck smuggling ring because it was the perfect way for them to contact revolutionary groups in other cities. Instead of being angry that they were using him in this way, he began to work with them deliberately. He would take the game to another level, and outwit his enemies as Kliff had advised him. Unfortunately, Reinhold was the power behind the military. That made Reno a turncoat. There were generals reading speeches in Washington, but it was Reinhold in his mountain fortress who called the shots. Any rebellion against the military would be a rebellion against Reinhold. Yet it was impossible to come to terms with the Army. It was their arbitrariness that got to him. If they could be bribed once and for all, he would know what to expect. Instead they heaped abuse on innocent citizens, frisked women at checkpoints, slapped old men in the public square. Reminding himself that he was the protector of his turf, he threw himself into the role of revolutionary with gusto. He would help his friends with their most important goal, infiltrating and destroying the Citadel. Everyone in the underground knew about the Citadel, but no one knew where it was. They wanted to take the command center by surprise, attacking it before it realized an attack was coming. If they succeeded in disabling the Citadel, Reinhold's agents would lack instructions, and the carefully regulated balance of forces would fall apart, pitting regional commanders against each other. That would give their movement room to breathe. Otherwise it was all over, because one small band of rebels would lose a war of attrition against a full-blown army. Reno pursued a careful strategy. He formed a secret commando unit and used it to subdue his weaker rivals, winning their allegiance. This gave him experience in the field, and allowed him to unite revolutionary cells throughout the Heartland in one agenda. Meanwhile, his spies made a map of Reinhold's operations, with the idea of uncovering his lines of communication and tracing them back to their source. They identified his agents and tracked them, but kept losing the trail. It was the Blues Singer who gave them the breakthrough they needed. She met a newcomer at the bathhouse, an Army intelligence officer who had gone there undercover. She quickly understood that he was a Citadel insider sent to learn about their plot. With an intricate blend of seduction and torture, she used his own weapons against him and extracted his most precious secret, the location of the Citadel. Acting on her information, Reno led his forces in a direct assault. They formed a base camp in the hills overlooking the Citadel, and moved weapons into the area. His commando unit was small but highly trained. A larger force would create a diversion while he and his specialists raided the Citadel. They would storm the compound, targeting the nerve center and Reinhold himself. They were assassins, prepared to sacrifice themselves to attain their goal. He gave the signal and they went into action. Reinhold was ready for them and they were quickly surrounded. The Blues Singer had betrayed them, tipping off the enemy. Reno and a small group of rebels broke through the trap, but Reinhold's forces caught up with them in the Utah desert. In the resulting standoff, Reno shot himself rather than be captured. • • • It was a winter that was summer, almost. As such, it was a premonition of the end of the world. In his guise as a corporate executive at the highest levels, Reinhold sat in his office tower and surveyed his domain. The midday heat made the room stuffy, and the traffic moved in the streets below him with a desperate noise. There was a sense that the city was poised on the brink of a supreme self-renunciation. The nation was at war for no particular reason. This war, though happening halfway around the world, was causing changes in the atmosphere at home. Swirls of pink fumes, or blue goo, enveloped the citizenry and clung to their skin as they scurried from subway to apartment. Last night's debutantes woke to find their faces melted into the pillow, while whores for half a century became sweet-scented virgins overnight. Reinhold's rat face sniffed with haunting precision the perfumed vapors that encased the city. He was bored with his rat-faced disguise. He longed for a ceremony of music and muscle, a disco Armageddon as the world slipped into chaos. He turned from the window in his high-backed swivel chair. With fingers like jointed pencils, or ribbed condoms, he groped for a cigarette among the multitude of accoutrements cluttering his fur-lined box. • • • The world disintegrated according to Timmins' predictions. Somewhere, he imagined, Colonel Reinhold was laughing. Anton had failed to change reality to his liking. He had failed to rally others against Reinhold, or damage him in any way. Not even Anton's memory remained to serve as a warning, despite Timmins' best efforts. Yet possibly Anton's real mission hadn't been to stop Reinhold, but to get out of the world while there was time. In that, he had succeeded brilliantly. So why had he urged Timmins to stay behind to tell his story? Why had he insisted that Timmins witness the whole slow-motion catastrophe? What purpose did that serve? Timmins remained in his Iowa farmhouse well into old age, despite the worsening conditions around him. He had everything he needed right outside his door, a garden for growing vegetables, a few goats and chickens. He amused himself by tending bees. He'd been living in the same place for over fifty years, and it had become filled with mementos and creative clutter. He kept up with events in the world at large, mainly through rumor. Braving the dangers, a steady stream of visitors came from as far away as Peru and Japan. The sort of people who would make such a pilgrimage were fascinating to Timmins. A network of friends saw to his needs from afar, collectors and gallery owners he'd known throughout his career. His fondest wish was to die quietly at home, as a man of his advanced years might expect. Yet this proved impossible. Life in the rural interior got so dangerous that his protectors no longer felt they could guarantee his safety there. Against his wishes, he was moved to St. Louis where conditions were better. He was installed in a comfortable apartment and looked after by a young assistant. Every item from the old house was moved with him and put back in the same order. This was a gift from his benefactors, "a gesture of compassion to a great artist." He felt brittle now, hard, fragile and sharp. He watched things fall apart around him with a sense of defeat. The tide of chaos was rising. It was only a matter of time. • • • "In the streets is the sound of gunfire, in the distance is fire and smoke." Timmins sat by the window in his wheelchair, huddled in blankets. He was muttering to himself as he always had. His young assistant stood behind him, pale hands resting on the back of the wheelchair. He watched with attention as a group of youths chased a bystander off the sidewalk, through a line of parked cars and onto the pavement. When the youths caught up to the man, they clubbed him with steel pipes, knocking him down. They kicked him savagely in the face, stomach and groin. He rolled over on his back, arms spread, bleeding from the mouth. They crushed his knees, elbows and wrists one by one with blows from the pipes. An explosion welled up on the horizon, moving through the air like a river of heat. The floor shivered, the windows rattled, something fell from a shelf and shattered. An orange glow silhouetted the buildings. Thick clouds of oily smoke pushed forcefully into the air. "Someone has exploded the old refinery. Now if we want to keep warm this winter, we'll have to break apart abandoned buildings and burn the scraps." Nervousness flickered on the glasses of the young assistant. "What can we do?" "Nothing! There's nothing to do but watch. All my life I've dreamed of this, was hungry for this. Ever since I was young, I knew it was coming. It played with us, took its time. Now our only role is to be here, to witness the catastrophe. It's a priceless jewel, you know, to be present at the end of the world." He cackled and broke off. Something had disturbed him. "Now that we're here, it's not what I'd hoped. It's not a purifying force at all." "Will we survive?" "You might," Timmins scoffed. "If it's important to you. Survival comes naturally to you, I suppose. I'm old. I ask for death and it doesn't come. I'm being kept alive for some reason. It's like a punishment. Mistakes made in our youth, roads not taken...every cause has an effect, an irreversible chain that leads...that leads to this." His voice had sunk into itself, no longer acknowledging the other's presence. There was silence in the room. The young man lit a cigarette, and the red tip reflected in his glasses. Outside, the street began to grow dark. The orange glow from the refinery was still lurid on the horizon. Below them, a woman in a red dress had joined the youths and was laughing with them, loudly and incontinently, as they stripped the clothes and searched the pockets of the man who lay there, dying or already dead. After a time, Timmins spoke again. "This phenomenon, you know, is being repeated, not just here in St. Louis, but in a thousand cities everywhere. The other day I was reading about how a mob had broken into the Louvre, taken the paintings from the walls and torn them apart, stomping them into the ground or making fires out of them to cook potatoes. They were angry that art is so expensive, so treasured. Those relics of another age were so precious, they had to have a whole palace to themselves, when there are millions of people going without shelter, without enough to eat. So they decided to do away with all that and start over. You know, I can sympathize, but there were some good paintings there, I hear. Even if any schoolboy would love to slash the Mona Lisa, simply because he's been told so often it's a masterpiece." • • • The city was dark and still. Timmins' young assistant had abandoned him, fearing for his own safety. He'd gone off on an errand two days before and hadn't returned. Timmins didn't blame him. "What use does he have for an old man like me?" Since there was no one there to tend to his needs, he hunkered down to wait for death. He still had enough food to last for a few days, but it wasn't worth the trouble. He was ready now. He was still waiting when two young toughs broke into his apartment. Angry at finding an old man in a wheelchair, they taunted him as they rummaged through his things. They tossed around canvasses and paints and old letters. Finally they spotted Anton's briefcase, the one with the tapes for The Last Assassin. Timmins smiled knowingly, which made them even angrier. The briefcase had lain untouched at the bottom of a box for fifty years. Seeing it again, he remembered that it contained a bomb. Anton had shown him once how to disarm it, but he'd never tried. He'd left it alone, intact and impregnable. The young toughs were unable to open the case, so they assumed it contained something valuable. They attacked it with a mallet and chisel they'd found among his things. "That's a high-risk object. It'll blow up if you force it open," Timmins told them calmly. They ignored him and continued their work. The chisel slipped several times, but finally they got traction. One of the toughs readied himself for the decisive blow. Timmins' final prediction came true as he was enveloped in a sheet of flame. Possibly he'd exaggerated, he thought as he ascended. Possibly this wasn't the end of the world after all. <<< Back Table of Contents