Free Going Shogun by Ernie Lindsey Page A

the
neighborhood.  He trots over to us, pops off a couple of shadowboxing jabs and
an uppercut. 
    The Minotaur shouts, “Go!” again,
more insistent this time, and another Roxyhead drops to the ground due to his
accurate aim.
    I say, “You okay, Fork?”
    “Trippin’ with an itsy-bitsy blue
polka-dot bruise-kini but I’m go for space, Brickness.  See me go rocketman on
those arm-pokers?”
    “Yeah, you were sugar.  Now open the
damn doors.”
    Another thug takes a round from The
Minotaur right in the center of his chest and his stark white t-shirt turns
into a juicy red Rorschach blot.  The others wise up and begin to back off.
    Bingo comes to life and she’s pissed . 
She grinds out, “Where were you?” and throws a meandering left hook that misses
his namesake teeth by millimeter.
    “Easy peasy bacon greasy,
Bingonator.  I made it back, didn’t I?”
    She starts to throw another scared,
angry, frustrated, distraught punch at him, but I catch her arm.  “Stop,” I
say, “We don’t have time for this.  Forklift.  We.  Go.  Now.  Simple enough
for you?”
    I take one last look at The Minotaur
and shout up at him, “Tomorrow night?” even though I’m not positive I’ll want to make another trip back into Urine Town after the last few minutes.
    He gives a thumbs-up and retreats
back inside his window like a moray eel slithering back into his cave.

Chapter
7
    We’re inside of Machine now,
doing a flyby on Urine Town’s dregs so fast that I swear the tires aren’t even
touching the ground.  We’re a hovercraft gliding across the marshes of city
slums.  We’re a rock skipping across the top of a dilapidated lake.  We are
wind.
    Forklift manipulates the steering
wheel like it’s an extension of himself; body, mind, and car are one single,
efficient unit.  We ease around 90° corners like they’re not even there,
passing nighthoneys in their skintight mini-skirts that are so short, I can see
what they had for breakfast.  They wave at us, catcall at us, flip us the
bird.  Machine must be a sight to them since most of the urchins in Urine
Town drive rusty, beat-up Chevrofords that run on electricity and can barely
make it down the block at 25mph. 
    Electric cars.  What a mistake that
was.
    They’re still around, barely, and
subsist on life support. 
    At first, it was one of the few logical
things The Board had ever instituted.  “To preserve our dear Mother Earth,”
they said. 
    That was a long time ago. 
    The major oil and gas companies
rebelled by using their vast, full football stadium piles of cash to turn every
company affiliated with the electric car industry into kowtowing fools that
bent over and took the pipeline like it was greased with Wishful Thinking’s
Chili Chestnut Doughnut Glaze.  When those guys were on their payroll and
sufficiently sequestered, they went after local Under Board members and kept
right on working their way up the chain until they reached the big guys.  They
were all so in bed together that corruption birthed corruption birthed
corruption.  It was like putting a gaggle of highboys and nighthoneys in a locked
room with nothing but a crate of Sex Booster Pro and no Penis Protectors.
    The power lies in the money.  Always
has, always will. 
    Who has it, and who has more of it. 
    That whole thing, the waiting, the
payoffs, the corruption, it didn’t matter to the Oil Magnates.  They knew that
being patient for five years and using billions of dollars on bribes would be
worth their ROI once the industry came back around.  By then, everyone was
worked into a corner.  The Magnates had The Board by their gray-haired, saggy,
empty balls, and the rest of us didn’t have a choice when gas went from $10 a
gallon to where it sits now.  We’re taught in Life School that the exact same
thing happened in the early 2000s, but evidently nobody learned their lesson
because history, in fact, does repeat itself.
    I look over to Forklift, and his
face is as