David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

He fell asleep again, and this time his dreams were too abstract to decoct. The ladder scenario was not reprised, except possibly as a dream within a dream, but this time in Aramaic or something.

Everybody up!”

Leila sat upright. She was in a different sleeping bag. Oh, yeah .

A too-bright lantern came to life in the main room below them. Trip was down there, clapping his hands loudly.

“Diarists,” he yelled. “There’s been a breach and we’re evacuating the farm. We’re leaving now. I’m going to the greenhouse. I’ll be back in eight minutes.” He moved, then stopped. “Scratch that. Constance, check the go-bags, and see that the cabin is clean. Roman, go get the saddle and panniers on Little Nell. Whiskey, Tango, and Foxtrot up there, you guys grab your shit and get outside. Scratch that. I need one of you with me. Mark, you ever use a flamethrower?”

Mark was sitting up in bed, buckling his ruined shoes. “I have not,” he called hoarsely. “But I’m game to try.”

Leila was quick down the loft ladder. Leo behind her.

“What can I do, Constance?” Leila asked.

“You and Leo stand there. Await my instructions.” Constance began to remove fancy backpacks from a wardrobe. She was opening and checking each one.

It was just Leila and Leo, waiting in a corner.

“About last night, in the barn,” he said to her.

Really? she thought. Now?

“I definitely do want to live in Rome with you,” he said. “I just don’t know what comes between here and there, now and then. I think I’m strong enough for almost anything, but I’ve thought that before.”

“Can’t you just settle for a minute?” she said. “You sound so certain, and then you get all Or it could be this other way too. ” He nodded to concede the point, which annoyed her even more. “How can you be sure about us, then, Leo, that we have this big story in front of us?”

“Because of our numbers,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

He looked almost embarrassed to have to tell her. “I’m your square root, Leila.”

A zap in the air between them, audible, like the snap of twig, the thwang of a snapped trap. In her mind, his number leaped up, its digits sparking, marrying, and multiplying. Indeed, multiplied by itself, it was her number. She felt the key find its tumblers and then a door open inside her. Nothing about eye tests or shadow governments. Just love. That expansion of the soul, that reaching out. Her story ran through his.

“The bags, Montes,” said Constance. “Out to the barn. Chop-fucking-chop. I want us over the ridge in twenty minutes.”

Leo moved to grab the bags, but Leila stood there, dazed.

“Lola?” said Constance, more loudly, waving a hand impatiently at Leila. “You with us?”

“Leo says he’s my square root.”

Constance looked at Leila and then at Leo. Roman turned and did the same. Then they each nodded.

“Well, that is remarkable,” said Constance.

Leo wished Trip had given him a job. Mark was getting to use a flamethrower. But this way, he could stay near Leila. He had woken with such desire for her. Her face was still soft from sleep.

He and Leila each grabbed three of the fancy knapsacks, heavy and full. They left the cabin and walked into the creeping dawn outside. The eastern horizon was the color of a peach, but the sky above them was still an azure bowl. A brand-new day, he thought.

He looked back. A thick plume of gray smoke, darker against the dark sky, rose from inside the forest of novophylum. Leo could hear whump s and a rising crackle, presumably the sound that a greenhouse makes as it’s being flamethrown.

“Which one of us is which, did he mean, do you think?” he asked Leila as they crossed the wide meadow.

“Which one of us is which which?” she said.

“Trip said Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot. You think I’m Foxtrot? I bet you’re Tango. I’m probably Foxtrot.”

With a nod, she allowed that he was Foxtrot.

“What about my code name?” she said. “You think I should stick with Lola Montes? I didn’t choose it.”

“Stick with it. It suits you.”

“You chosen a name yet?”

“Pace Backenforth?” He saw that she saw the joke in that. “No. I’m going with Leo Crane.”

“I see what you did there,” she said.

Did she? Did she see that he had forgiven himself for not being a genius? Did she see that he was ready to stand up and start pushing back against the world, no longer a fugitive or an apologizer; that he wanted a child and a task and to row in with all he had; that it was all due to her somehow, that she had turned a key? Of all the times and places, she lived in this one, and he did too, and they had come upon each other. That could be luck or something grander; either way worked for him.

“Did you have any dreams?” he asked her. His dream of her had been so vivid, she must have dreamed of him also. The world turned out to have hidden languages and plant computers. Probably, in such a world, you can co-dream with your square root.

She squinted up at him. So beautiful. So close.

“Oh. They were amazing. Something about my dad driving his hospital bed around an apple orchard. But then I was driving it instead, and it was a boat instead of a bed, and my mother was throwing baby rabbits at me from the top of the Golden Gate Bridge.”

Nope. Still a mystery.

Mark caught up with them, huffing, sweating. He smelled like he’d just rolled in a bonfire. “You know where we’re going?” he asked them both.

“No idea,” said Leo. Through the open door of the barn ahead of them, he could see Roman slipping a bridle over Little Nell’s head. Then he saw another man in the barn. But who? Trip and Constance were behind them. “Stay here a sec, you guys,” he said. He slipped up to the barn door and peeked in. He came back.

“Who’s the other guy?” Leila asked.

“I dunno. Some guy. Maybe our ride out. There’s also a Thing in there.”

“What kind of a thing, Leo?” asked Mark, with strained patience.

“A Thing. You know. Like a buggy.”

“A Volkswagen Thing?” said Mark.

Constance rolled up behind them, pushing a wheelbarrow full of laptops.

“Where are we going, Constance?” asked Leila.

“Mark’s going to the coast, quickly. The rest of us are going to Seven Ranch, in Enterprise.”

“Is that my ride in there?” asked Mark. Constance nodded.

The man stepped out of the barn. Leila craned her neck and squinted at him.

“He’s one of us?” asked Leo.

“He may be. But he’s also a government agent, and he hasn’t been tested,” said Constance.

“That’s no good,” said Leila.

With a nod, Constance confirmed it was sub-ideal. “But we need him right now. He backs up what Mark told us, that our SineCo asset has been playing us. But he has real assets, inside Pope’s shop. Double agents.”

“Triple, if you think about it,” said Leo.

“He’s got someone on that boat. Someone you’ll need, Mark, when you get there.”

“So I’m supposed to ride down the mountain, alone, with an untested government agent?” said Mark. “I thought you people had rules.”

Leila went intently toward the barn. There was something about that man. When she walked in, yellow light spilled from an overhead fixture. Her eyes took a moment to adjust. Roman was putting panniers on the pony. The new man was checking under the hood of a car. It was one of those faceted VW buggies from the seventies, faded orange. When he turned and nodded at her, she knew exactly who he was. It was Ned. The one who’d first turned her onto Ding-Dong.com. In Mandalay, he’d looked like a doughy, slightly-too-large-headed guy. That cologne he’d worn to their meeting. Here in the barn, he was handsome and strong-jawed.