Free Sherwood Nation by Benjamin Parzybok

slight breeze shifted the big dead trees dryly over them. Renee stared up into the eerie branches and listened. There was no human sound.
    Renee pointed with her chin toward a house down the street. It was obscured behind a wiry mass of leafless shrubbery.
    The house was a Craftsman, but it had been built as if, Renee thought, the builder didn’t understand the scale represented on the blueprints. Everything about the house was big, and it dwarfed the other houses on the block. It stood three stories tall and occupied a massive footprint. Like other houses in the neighborhood, it sat on a big lot, in this case a full acre. An eight-foot chain-link fence and the remains of a thickly treed perimeter encased it like an urban fortress.

    Zach did the poster layout over lunch. He was cautious, but he knew he didn’t need to be. No one would look at his machine except Berger, a project manager, who liked to glide around like some kind of inter-office eel and look at everyone’s screens. But Berger had contracted E. coli and was in the hospital. Renee’s group fled after warrants were put out for their arrests, their identities pieced together by video-tape and surveillance. They didn’t dare use any traceable medium to try and contact each other. So he and Renee had schemed up the coded poster. Before becoming a copywriter he’d been a graphic artist and had enjoyed the work.
    He hand-drew a robin with a leather aviator hood. Across the robin was strapped a quiver full of slender water vials. He scanned and colorized the drawing and along the bottom he typed 147S@LHURST@9, which he hoped would translate to: The Robin Hoods (or, the robbing hoods, as it were) who lived at 147 Skidmore meet at the Laurelhurst Theater at 9 p.m. Then Zach would post vigil in front of the theater for a few minutes every night, waiting for one of them to materialize, unsure if this was what he really wanted in the first place. He could recognize them by sight, and some nights the theater still worked, showing a single short film, whatever they managed to get going while the power was on, imported from the East Coast or from their archives.
    He was helping Renee, but were he honest with himself he could care less about the rest of her activist-crew. He felt certain they would only suck her more deeply into trouble—something she was fairly capable of doing already. He wasn’t sure any of them were bright enough to turn his obscure poster into a private message anyway. And he felt it highly likely that he was endangering Renee rather than helping her. He leaned back from the design and appreciated his work. All things aside, it was, he saw, really fucking good.
    Still, he had to help somehow. He thought of her constantly, up in some strange, dangerous neighborhood. He’d do whatever he could.
    Zach stood up in his cube and eyed the printer down at the end of the hall. There were six office doorways—three sets, one on each side of the hall—to pass by in order to retrieve the side project from the large-format color printer. A layout of this size would occupy the printer for about three minutes. Zach stretched and then walked casually down to the printer. As he went he tried to eye which offices were occupied and which weren’t, a thing he could never remember. A few had permanently closed doors, colleagues who’d migrated away, or in one case, died. The printer was off the break room, where Nevel appeared to be cleaning furiously, and so Zach turned around self-consciously and shuffled back to his desk. He hated this. He pulled out a legal pad of paper and quickly scratched out half a dozen word associations so there was evidence of work on his desk. They were trying to pitch a satellite telecommunications firm that sold equipment to the Middle East. One of the few companies with energy exemptions. Business must go on. One must work under the premise that the apocalypse was not nigh. And it seemed to him that money was sought after even more