A revolution’s what it’s smelling like, it ain’t gonna be televised
Governments is hellified, taking cake and selling pie
I ain’t got a crust or crumb, to get some I’d be well obliged
Murder is commodified, felon for the second time
Never was I into chasing trouble, I was followed by it
Facing trouble with no alibi, had to swallow pride
Vilified, victimized, penalized, criticized
Ran into some people that’s surprised I was still alive
He headed south, crossing over an empty highway and continuing along an endless dirt road. He couldn’t see a goddamn thing, but he had heard trains down there somewhere so he kept going. Despite the circumstances, it was a joy to be off the base. Brutus walked for an hour before he found the tracks, which he blindly followed east until reaching a tiny backwoods train station — a concrete shack of one open-air room, now yellowed with old paint and cigarette smoke. He might as well have been in Chehaw. The graffiti was extensive and poorly done. A long wooden bench lined the perimeter, interrupted only by the gated and padlocked ticket window and doors to the men’s and women’s rooms, which were denoted by metal cartoon cutouts of children peeing. Swinging double doors led to the platform out back. The place was completely deserted except for a solitary sleeping bum. He looked frozen to death.
The posted schedules looked nothing like SEPTA’s back home, but from what Brutus could gather the trains to Budapest ran every couple of hours all night long. If he waited long enough, maybe he could catch one to Vienna or Warsaw or Zagreb instead. Border security would be tightest this close to the base, though. He didn’t have any forints but assumed he could make do with hard currency until he found a bank. He kept an eye on the sleeping dude, not sure if he was really asleep after all. Sullivan would have spies everywhere. These people really were out to get him. Brutus sat at the end of the room, where he could see the doors both to the street and to the tracks. He resisted the urge to open up the bag. The station was unheated, and he waited for forty-five minutes before a train whistled in the distance. He hid near the platform as it pulled to a grinding halt. No one got off except a MÁV conductor in a blue uniform and red hat, who wobbled to the end of the five-car train and signaled up to the engineer with a flashlight. Brutus took off his headphones and emerged from the shadows of the station, startling him. “Budapest?” he asked.
“Ja, Budapesht,” the old dude said, correcting Brutus’s pronunciation. Hungarian civilians typically spoke some mishmash German to all foreigners, regardless of their actual nationality. His mustache drooped from the constant assault of breath that smelled like onions sautéed in kerosene.
“How much?” Brutus produced a few bills of smaller denominations. He handed the guy a twenty. “This good?” The conductor took it and wandered slowly back up to the hissing engine. Brutus climbed through the nearest door.
The train was empty except for a few old men chain-smoking unfiltered cigarettes. Despite the vast number of free seats, they stood at the windows, spitting into the empty night. The entire train smelled like piss, stale beer, and more piss. Brutus went into an empty compartment. Four sepia-toned photos depicting the history of Hungarian railway innovation decorated the walls. Someone had scratched a swastika into the plastic covering of one. Another had the white remains of a sticker over the front of a trolley. Brutus slid the glass door shut, secured the lock, and closed the curtains. Then he removed his belt and ran it through the armrest of his red bench seat and through the handles of the bag.
The train lurched and then rolled eastward. Eventually, it would turn north.
The bag contained six assault rifles — Hungarian-made AMD-65s — each wrapped in a thick, chamois bag. So it was weapons after all. Upon closer inspection, they turned out to be semiautomatics that someone had converted by hand to fully auto. Totally illegal back in the States and likely in Hungary too.
Now he got it: he was going to meet some scraggly motherfucker with a goofy accent and an eyepatch at a table in the back of some dark bar. Hand over the bag, drink a whiskey, and, depending on how things pan out, either head back to Taszár or get out of the country by any means possible.
In addition to the rifles and his clothes, the bag also contained a map of Budapest with a red circle around a street corner next to the Danube and an Arden edition of Julius Caesar. No passport. Brutus removed his jacket and sat down to think things over. There were a few different ways the day could play out. In one scenario, Sullivan would wait until Brutus arrived at Eve and Adam’s and then wash his hands of him. In another, M.P.s would snatch his ass off the streets so no word of the operation got back to the base.
Brutus typically didn’t mind the M.P.s too much. He could handle them just like he could, and had, any pigs back home — yessuh, nossuh, anything you say, suh — or he could pop one and watch the rest scatter. But he certainly didn’t want to get tangled with any corrupt elements of the corps, not if it could be avoided. They were a mean bunch of motherfuckers. Sullivan’s kind of people. That was what now worried him. Once Brutus delivered the bag, Sullivan would have to send the marines after him. The same dudes who had been down to Taszár. That visit had been part of Sullivan’s plan all along. They had come to the base for the sole purpose of choosing their guinea pig. They needed someone expendable. Fuck. Brutus would never be allowed near the base again. He was too much of a liability. It would be that asshole sergeant and Doornail and those guys — whatever the fuck their stupid names were — hunting him down. No question. And without a passport, he was trapped.
His army career was officially over. Funny — that was exactly what he had wanted so badly the past few months, but not like this. Another of Sullivan’s jokes. You want out of the army, boy, you can have out. The marines would pick him up at Eve and Adam’s or on the train back to Taszár and that would be it. Throw him out the window like a cigarette butt.
Sullivan would betray him — maybe he already had — but Brutus couldn’t skip the drop. Any tiny hope of salvation depended on the timely delivery of the weapons. Anything else would be sure suicide.
There was nothing to see out the window but his reflection. He unholstered Sparky’s sidearm and saw at once that it wouldn’t fire. Anticipating the theft, Sparky had switched their weapons before Brutus did, the cocksucker. Now he would be without a piece, except for the ones meant for delivery. It had been a little while since he had fucked around with an AMD.
The cabin felt insufferably hot. The heater under his seat charred the backs of his legs to a juicy, tender medium-well, and someone had bolted the window shut. He was sweating like crazy but didn’t risk opening the door. No telling who else was on the train. He picked up Julius Caesar and flipped through it, the pages sticking to his fingers, until he found that someone had highlighted a passage in yellow:
There was a Brutus once that would have brooked
Th’eternal devil to keep his state in Rome
As easily as a king.
Fucking-a right. Brutus wouldn’t tolerate a king any more than he would tolerate the devil himself. An empire or a republic — that was still the issue, the reason he was in Hungary at all. It had been two or three years since he had last read it, but the thing he liked the most about Julius Caesar was that there was no definite good guy or bad guy. Brutus and Caesar, they were both good and bad at the same time. The reader was supposed to think Brutus was evil after he wetted his friend, but he turned out to be the cooler of the two.