Noise (11 page)

On Oak Street, we moved in Z-file, staggered. Mary followed me, Four followed her. Levi walked last. Without streetlights, without
flashlights and campfires, we could see the stars. The blurry band of the Milky Way. On Scout campouts, we couldn’t even see any constellations—they were too polluted by their own stars, and our dads had to bend the rules to get us our Astronomy Merit Badges, out west at summer camp.

Even Mary, in her white, was hard to see in the dark when I turned around. I led them straight down the center of the road, between parked and abandoned cars. I wouldn’t take them right up against the historic homes that lined the street because I didn’t want to alarm anyone. I didn’t want to give anyone a reason to think we had come for their things.

At one house, we heard people talking in the side yard, behind a fence. Male voices.

…
Take no chances…
.

I stopped us. Pulled us into a crouching cluster in the middle of the road.

“Mary,” I ordered. “Cocktail.”

I couldn’t let this bunch, talking into the dark, get the jump on us.

She pulled loose a cocktail and set it on the asphalt. Four handed her another to fill the empty lariat.

“Light it,” I told Four.

She did, hiding the mostly blue flame with her cupped hands.

“Levi,”
Prometheus
, “divert their attention.”

I looked at Mary. Grabbed her shoulder. “You and Four, thirty yards ahead. Get the jump.”

She grabbed Four, and they took off, sprinting low and quiet. Practicing ninjutsu without the tall grass. You were supposed to run like your hands were holding rails.

I stood up with Levi, and he threw the cocktail.

•   •   •

On my twenty-first birthday, Adam and I went bar-hopping around the Strip. On the way home, down Oak Street, with its better sidewalks than Mulberry, I bummed cigarette after cigarette from Adam. I’d been smoking them with him that night, which was something new to do—together—since returning from the West. From the university in Lubbock, that first year. From weekend visits to my cousin’s farm.

Later, I convinced him to quit.

The Strip-rat was not in the street anymore. When I looked at the Wailing Wall, I was tired. It showed something that couldn’t have been real, so I looked away. It was dark.

It couldn’t have been real.

I didn’t look back, in case it was.

Around two corners, a few blocks away, someone was shouting into a bullhorn. They’d be on Meyer Street, which once contained the fronts of the Strip, before the renovation began. Nearby, there’d be the three-story Auditorium Building at the edge of campus. One of many massive buildings with cement walls behind brick walls between wet walls. We took our literature classes there, listening to musicians practice on the massive, one-of-a-kind organ in the heart of the building. In the auditorium that was no longer used.

We’d scoped the building before. If you boarded up the glass windows, it’d be impenetrable. The Guard wouldn’t be able to take it except by siege if Salvage had holed up inside. There would be massive casualties on both sides, particularly for the invaders.

The building had a basement, with a crawl space. You could use it to gain access to the municipal sewer line under Meyer. We had the specs.

“In the event of a separation,” I said to the Party, “rendezvous in the Oak Street Building. In the courtyard.”

I took ceramics classes in the Oak Street Building. It was behind us, over our shoulders really, a satellite just off the main campus.

They nodded.

“If you wait there, alone, for over an hour, fall back to the HOC.”

Gunfire erupted. I heard the pneumatic grunts of nerve-agent cannons. It would be mild stuff, with a narrow radius.

That
thing
, on the Wall, couldn’t have been real. There was nothing wrong with us. With the
Book
.

The storefront windows went all at once, concussed from their frames. Books fell off the shelves easily. Between semesters, the university bookstore didn’t keep as many, so the shelves were lightly packed. You only had so long to sell your texts back before the next semester. They sent them back and then bought them again. Over and over, emptying and filling shelves. It wasn’t owned by the university, but you had to buy your books there.

We learned that “Used Saves.”

The Party was fine, in the middle of the store, against one wall. I checked.

There’d been a kid with a gun standing by the front window. The Meyer Street window. Now he had glass in his face. In his eyes. There was a piece lodged in his throat, an alien flap silencing his screams. He was horribly alive.

I took his .30-caliber Beretta, the ammo. A crib sheet from his back pocket. He had a hypodermic needle. If he was Salvage, on recon, or a recruiter, maybe, it was his ticket out. The chemical
stylus that would shear the layers of his brain, wiping him out and the intel he had with him.

I shoved it in his neck and depressed the plunger. Because in the Boy Scouts, you take an oath to “Help other people at all times.”

If it was morphine, or something like, he’d die shitfaced and weightless.

Be prepared
, our fathers had taught us.

Outside, in the middle of Meyer, one of the Humvees was a burning shell. The blast had blown the wheels off, which meant it had come from underneath. There was a hole in the asphalt under the truck. Someone had moved through the crawl space under the Auditorium Building and blown the shit out of the Guard. The smoke looked like a hydra, streaming out from under the Humvee in cohesive pillars. It smelled like smoke and sulfur. The brimstone from the underground sewer.

Demolitions cooks were usually Secondary Party Members. Somebody had cooked the shit out of something before they stuck it under that Humvee.

I thought about Four, staring at the mirror, dark snakes in the darkness. We had given her a black mask, and she wore black paint, like us.

If the kid on the floor had been wearing a mask, the glass had torn it away.

A different Humvee, farther up Meyer, opened fire on the Auditorium Building. There was a Guard in a riot mask firing the .50-caliber machine gun from the top of the truck’s frame.

I saw two other Guards standing behind the Humvee, loading a rocket-propelled grenade launcher—an RPG, which was the same acronym we used for “role-playing game.” For D&D.

I stepped away from the kid.

•   •   •

They’d retreated to the store’s office, on my orders.

“We’re going to need the assault Humvee,” I told Levi.

“Why?”

I looked at him. I thought about that image on the Wailing Wall. It couldn’t have been real. I had nothing to worry about.

But if it wasn’t, what else hadn’t been real?

There would be nothing more from Fat Chance. White would never be Hope again. The Last Man was fucked from the get-go. After all,
last
implies the slow and eventual removal. Of everybody. Otherwise, he’d just be called “The Man.”

If it was real, then it wasn’t going to go that way. Not if I could get that Humvee. Not if I had that .50-cal, and that RPG, and those nerve agents. If I had them, I could make them burn—anybody who wanted to make that message real.

“No questions. Not in Party.”

He remembered. Nodded.

“What’s the complement?” he asked.

I told him.

“Armament?”

I told him.

I looked down. “Who’s this corpse?”

In the back of the office, there were others, still alive. Mary was on her knees, writing something down—something one of them was saying. There were about ten of them. They looked scared. They were looking at Mary. At White Mary. At a new Hope.

Four was kneeling against the other wall, whispering into one’s ear. A girl. She had her hands on the girl’s shoulders. The girl was nodding.

“The corpse took a forty-four blast to the spine,” Levi said, “from the one with Four.”

I looked at Four’s girl.

“The corpse made a go at Mary when she stepped in to secure the room. The girl with the forty-four over there knew what the corpse was up to. Perfect angle. Knew the Plan. Overtake the Outsiders, I’m guessing.”

“Didn’t seem to like the idea,” I said.

I looked again at Mary. She had untied her mask. Four had painted her entire face and neck white before we left. She looked porcelain, a doll. The virgin queen.

I smirked. “Four’s girl saw a pure, white Mary step into the darkness.”

“White Mary.”

“She liked that Plan better.”

“They’re one Party, but different Groups.”

“What?”

Levi turned back to look at them. “It was a coordinated operation—some of the best cooks around, sent to task by their Leaders.”

Organized Salvage?

“The hell?”

“They aren’t Primary. Were only here to wait on their escort out.”

Jesus. The kid with the syringe had been their sentry
.

“Leaders wouldn’t risk them running around town on their own.”

“Where’s the escort?” I asked.

“An hour late.”

I turned to leave. “Line them up.”

“Where are you going?”

“Stop asking questions.”

•   •   •

Mary was standing next to me. They’d lined them up.

“Did you get the last line of White’s story? From one of them?”

“Yes.”

“Read it.”

Mary looked at me. That was where it had cut off—where our version of the story had originally ended.

“Read the rest.”

“How many Groups are you?” I asked the line. Eight male, two female—

I was fifteen the first time I created a secret society. With Chuck and Adam. We created a knighthood
.

—Mary looked at me. I nodded.

“This isn’t an interrogation,” she said.

“We don’t want your Groups’ intel. Just the details of this operation.”

By-laws. Codes of conduct. An entire philosophy for secret life
. Salvage had rites and contests and ways for determining Leadership.

“Six,” Four’s girl said.

Six. Christ
.

“Who’s Party Leader, then?” I asked.

A couple of them looked at each other. Most were looking at Mary.

“Gong,” one said. “The sentry by the Meyer door.”

“Dead,” I told them.

“We had a rendezvous point here, in the bookstore,” Four’s girl said. “It was planned once White’s last broadcast came through.”

She looked down at her hands. “They were going to get us out. Take us back”—

In our knighthood, we wore key rings on chains around our necks. A circle, our symbol. We wore them at all times. I wore mine that summer, on an exchange trip. Italy, Austria, Hungary. Trying to live with honor in foreign countries
.

—“What happened?”

“We don’t know.”

“You’re cooks,” I said. “All of you?”

“Yes”—

In the order, in the knighthood, we had new names. Titles and epithets. Designations of rank
.

—“You cooked the trap under the Humvee?”

“Yes.”

“But your Leaders wouldn’t let you detonate it.”

“Too much risk, they said,” one of the males said. “Even running like fuck, through the service tunnels under the road.”

“Your escort is probably up to its ass in artillery, on campus.”

“You can’t stay here,” Mary said.

“Are you staying with your families?” Four asked.

“Don’t ask about their families.”

“Ishmael was supposed to come,” Four’s girl said.

I looked at Levi.

•   •   •

“Mary, talk to them. Find out.”

I signaled Levi:
Make the offer
.

I walked away. To do Something Important, as far as they were concerned.

I came back.

“Dietary restrictions?” I asked Mary.

“No.”

“Medical?”

“No.”

One of the cooks had worked the grenade-launcher mod for his 20-gauge. He had at least ten shells and dowel mounts around his waist, under his belt. But he didn’t have any cocktails. Levi and I had thought about the modification before, but we didn’t have shotguns.

We had plenty of cocktails.

I handed Four a pile of T-shirts, all the same color. Red was all I could find—it was the school color. Levi gave Mary tubes of paint from the school spirit section, also red. They were for painting your face—for football games.

The first kid stood still. Rigid.

I pushed the cap off a black marker. I didn’t have any other way of doing this. On his left cheekbone, I drew a wildstyle
A
and one down-pointing chevron beneath. Mary painted around it. Ruth cut the shirts for their masks. They would look like Imperial Guard, I realized—

When it’s your turn, when it’s you in the Boy Scouts, inducting initiates, giving them the secrets of the Order of the Arrow, you don’t have to keep quiet. It’s your job to listen for discussion. You cut chips in their
arrows—the ones the inductees have carved and wear on lariats around their necks—when they speak. You tell them secrets, Indian stories, and make them work
.

—I went down the line.

“Your first-place is the House of Cards.”

They were well armed. Each of them. Outfitted like Primaries. Probably the best their Groups could give them.

“Our objective is the Humvee firing on the Auditorium Building, and the equipment carried by its Guard. This will be, primarily, an exercise in vigilance.”

They liked being told what to do. They weren’t in the corners anymore. They had White Mary now. A mother and a whore, carrying a gun. It was the hyperbolic Freudian dream, and she was wearing the paint for the role.

“The Group is everything. If Outsiders’ survival interests interfere with the Group’s, then, morally, these Outsiders are natural enemies. They are predators.”