Free Tyrannia by Alan Deniro Page A

advisors would say.
    “No . . . no. But maybe that’s for the better.” The president stood up and Roger followed suit. The president reached out to shake his hand and Roger moved right away to salute, leaving the president’s hand dangling there. But then the president returned the salute.
    “Stay here as long as you want,” the president said before leaving, and in two hours the bombers were in the air, reaching their cruising altitude. And Roger did stay in the bunker, for five months, as winter set in, and then—instead of spring—winter set in again throughout the Americas. Then after that, another winter of fog and ash, and the president’s hanging at Mount Vernon. Then the third winter skipped right to autumn, winds of acid and ice, the fall of two to three provisional governments, and then no governments at all, at least in the old sense of the word. Roger took a Humvee from Minot to Minneapolis, and he had to pay for the trip with his collection of Liberty dollar coins. The soldiers never talked with him, joshed with him, as they did before. The zoo was the safest place he could find.
    Of course, the world stabilized, after a fashion, and he was able to write again. People were still hungry for his stories. They were the same people as before, for the most part, the same survivors. And their children, who had little in the way of television, grew up with Mick Solon instead. Roger found an agent who understood this—his old agent having disappeared in the Manhattan reorganizations. Enclaves still believed in the rightness of Mick’s causes, that Mexico Moon was necessary and cleansing, only one salvo in the war for civilization.
    Roger obliged them.
    When he woke from his long sleep, he was put under house arrest. Not in so many words; no one announced this to him. But there was always an armed groundskeeper within eyesight of his house. The apprentice disappeared, and was found a few days later on the outskirts of the old zoo, where she had set up a makeshift bomb making factory and blew herself up by accident. The apprentice’s family demanded that Roger pay for her funeral. He used the request for a fire-starter. There was no body, he wanted to tell them. How can you bury a person without a body? Do you want to bury her jaw? Her femur? Her dental records? The investigation into the destruction of the sloth and the walkway found him neither guilty nor innocent, but rather complicit in a long-standing pattern of harboring and brainwashing terrorists. No charges came, though. On the other hand, they did arrest the fucker who drugged the giant sloth—tampering with megafauna was a serious crime. She was one of the medical assistants, who administered chemo at the free clinic and hated everything Roger stood for. He tried to follow her trial on the daily bulletins, but the painkillers he took for his legs would not let him focus on anything for too long, except for sleep. He tried to call his agent, but couldn’t remember the right access codes, and the screen would always stay blank, no matter what he did. Then in the middle of the night he heard the apprentice calling for him, pausing with her blowtorch and asking: Isn’t this what you would want me to do? And he would have said, No, not exactly—see, action has to be clean like writing is clean, there have to be clear consequences and no loose ends. Self-defense has to be guided by the conscience of liberty. The fight has to be a true one. People just want to forget about their problems. Also, you’re really fucking scaring me.
    And she might have paused, after listening to that impromptu lesson, letting it sink in.
    But she always went back to her welding.
    After a few weeks of this toss-and-turn, he received a package. The sky was clear and inviting when the courier knocked on his door and asked him to sign. The courier was young, barely out of UPS U. It was the first time Roger had gone outside, even a few steps, since the apprentice died.
    “What