hit the road, or both.”
“Agreed.”
“All right, then. Let’s head for home. Meeting time.”
We voted to stay.
And hide.
The polling was unanimous, except for Philipe. Everyone else seemed to be tired of killing, and despite what had happened to Buster, no one was in the mood to seek revenge. We were scared and wanted only to lay low.
“But where’ll we go?” Mary asked.
“There are a lot of nice homes in a new subdivision on the south end of town,” Joe suggested.
“How’s the access?” Philipe asked. “Any gates? How many roads in and out? Will we be able to keep the place secure?”
“Don’t worry.”
“The suits aren’t playing games,” Philipe said. “If they’re here, they’re here for a reason. They’ve already killed one of us — ”
“Joe can tell the police chief about these guys,” Tim pointed out. “He can have them hauled in for harassment or something. We can find out who they are, why they’re after us.”
Joe nodded. “I will.”
Philipe paused for only a second. “All right,” he said. “But be careful. If they know you’re one of us, they may try to take you out, too.”
“Don’t worry.”
Philipe nodded. “Okay. From now on, we’ll have someone on watch at all times, twenty-four hours a day.” He turned toward Joe. “Show us where this place is.”
We drove to the subdivision, took an empty ranch-style house at the end of a cul-de-sac so we could spot all corners. Joe did talk to the police chief and arranged for a patrol car to be stationed at the entrance of the subdivision. He gave the police a description of the suits, confirmed that the local police knew nothing about them, and made sure that the police would pick up any suits they could find for questioning.
“I think you’re safe,” Joe said.
“Maybe,” Philipe told him. “But I’m still keeping a man on watch. Just in case.”
It happened that night.
Once again, it was during a sandstorm. We were at the house. We’d been planning a barbecue, but the sandstorm had come and we’d moved inside, where Mary put the half-cooked chicken into the oven. We were sitting around waiting for the food, talking, drinking beer, watching a videotape of
He might’ve been in the bathroom, he might’ve been in the kitchen, but something told me that he wasn’t, and I quickly searched the rooms of the house and determined that he was not there. I opened the front door, looked outside. Through the blowing sand, I could see that all of our cars were still parked out in front.
And then I saw Philipe.
He was inside the house next door. I could dimly make out his silhouette through one of the side windows.
Something about that alerted me, sent up my antennae. I had a sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach, and I ran outside, jumped the small wooden fence that separated the two homes, and sped up to the porch next door. The front door was wide open, despite the sandstorm, and I walked right in. I hurried past the window where I’d seen Philipe, through a den, into a hallway. Philipe was before me, walking toward the far end of the hall.
In his hand was a carving knife.
“Philipe!” I yelled.
He ignored me, kept walking.
“Philipe!” I ran forward.
He was mumbling, talking to himself. I heard him say, “Yes,” and the way he said it sounded as though he were talking to someone.
Chills cascaded down my arms as I remembered him suggesting, when I first joined the terrorists, that God had chosen us for this work.
“Yes,” he said again, and he seemed to be answering a question. “I will.”
But he’d claimed that he didn’t hear voices.
“No,” he said to his unseen questioner.
“Philipe!” I grabbed his shoulder. He whirled around, swung at me with the knife, but when he saw who I was, pulled back, missing me.
Then he punched me in the nose.
I fell back against the wall, stunned and hurt, blood spilling from my nostrils and backing up into my throat. I spit, stood, tried to breathe. Philipe was gone, no longer in the hallway, and a split second later I heard a child’s staccato screams.
I ran through the open doorway at the end of the hall. Philipe was on his knees in the center of a pink girl’s room, flanked by twin beds. He was covered with blood, his eyes white and crazy in the midst of the red, and he was hacking at two small unmoving children on the ground before him.
“My name’s not David!” he screamed. “It’s Philipe!” He swung the knife, sliced into a shoulder. “My name is Philipe!”
I was pushed aside as a woman ran screaming into the room. Her screams stopped abruptly as the horror of the scene imprinted itself onto her brain. She fainted dead away, not collapsing gently and gracefully to the floor as women did in movies but falling flat and heavy, her head hitting the wooden floor with a hard thud, her outstretched right hand flopping into a puddle of her daughters’ blood.
There was a pink dresser next to the door. On top of the dresser were two piggy banks, and I picked one up and heaved it at Philipe’s head.
It hit, bounced off, and broke on the floor, pennies spilling into the blood. Philipe shook his head, blinked, and at the same time seemed to see for the first time the knife in his hand, the dead girls before him and me standing by the door. It was as if he had awakened from a trance, and he looked at me with weak, frightened eyes. “I didn’t… I had no… I had to — ”
“Save it,” I said.
“Help me clean this up. Help me get rid of this.” He stared up at me frantically, beseechingly, holding out his bloody hands, palms up.
Part of me felt sorry for him, but it was a small part of me. “No,” I said disgustedly.
“Something would’ve happened to us if I didn’t — ”
“What?” I demanded. “What would have happened to us?”
He started to cry. It was the first time I had ever seen Philipe cry and the sight tore at me, but the other sights in the room tore at me more. I could not forgive him for this. I could not justify what he had done. I would never defend him simply because we were both of a kind. Our kinship could not excuse this butchery.
“I’m out of the terrorists,” I said.
“Don’t tell the others — ”
“Fuck you.”
I walked out of the bedroom, out of the house, through the sandstorm back to Tim’s. I told everyone what had happened, what I had seen, and hushed and silent, they went next door. Steve and Junior stayed to help Philipe clean up the mess. The rest returned, shocked into silence.
“I’m out,” I said when they got back. “I resign.”
“You can’t resign,” Pete said.
“Why not?”
“You’re Ignored. You can’t just stop being Ignored by saying so.”
“Yeah, I’ll always be Ignored. But I’m no longer a Terrorist for the Common Man. I’m resigning from the
