Noise (12 page)

I finished the last one and stepped back. Let Mary and Four work their way down the line.

“You do not have names. You will take new names. For now, until we’ve reached the HOC, you will be referred to as Jacks. You will follow orders. At the HOC, we will give you a new
Book.
”

I waved Levi forward.

“We will take you to a Place,” he said, “where we will be safe—where we will be strong.”

If I can get the fire from the Humvee
.

I looked at him for a long time.

To make them burn
.

The thing about wildstyle graffiti is that no one writes it the same way. No one wrote
A’S
just the way I did, or used chevrons underneath.

But it was
my
tag on the Wall.

I’d never tagged anything.

So it couldn’t have been real—

We had disbanded the knighthood one year later because we wanted to kill it before we stopped believing it was real
.

—“You are not yourselves,” I said. I looked away, toward Mary. I wanted her to cinch this.

“Mary, divide them up. Two Parties. Secure this building.

“Four, get that grenade launcher armed.

“Levi, get some graph paper.”

“TWO”

SEC. “I,” SUBSEC. “C,” PROCEDURE “II”

(“THE SECOND PHASE”)

[1] (i) The Second Phase assumes the successful execution of the First. (ii) It assumes the Group has reconvened in toto at the first-place, Party casualties notwithstanding. (iii) If the First Phase is forgone, proceed directly to the Second Phase, the Evacuation.

[2] (i) You may Evacuate by a number of different means.

[3] (i) When the terrain requires you to travel by road, organized shipping lane, or established flight path, attempt to keep an Outsider’s vehicle in sight at all times. (ii) You may need to disable this other vehicle in order to Forage parts, should one of yours require repair. (iii) When possible, avoid “roadside” repairs and simply confiscate other vehicles. (iv) Expect resistance.

[4] (i) Your vehicles should not drive so closely together upon the open roads that they would be disabled simultaneously by anti-vehicle fire, roadside bombs, or other devices. (ii) If one vehicle is compromised, the other(s) should travel far enough ahead to double back and safely neutralize the roadside threat before attempting a rescue.

t
hey took their paint off, Mary and Four. Used some blood from the corpse in the office to distress their shirts. They ran tangentially toward the Humvee, so they wouldn’t surprise the Guard. Mary had her gun tucked under her waistband, up against her ass.

The Guard didn’t shoot the girls when they ran—panicking, yelling, bloodied, and wide-eyed—toward them. For help. For sanctuary. Five of the Jacks were watching from the roof, from the corner nearest the Humvee—Aleph Party. There was definitely another firefight deeper into campus, they reported. Around the bell tower.

Two of the other Jacks were at the far corner, looking the other way down Meyer. We’d given one, the leader, my walkie-talkie. He would coordinate between his Party, Beta, and the last Party, Chi, who were at the other end of the roof, watching over Oak Street. He reported to Levi, whom I put in charge of the operation. To call it off, to redirect as needed. I was the free agent. I wanted it that way, for this. The Jacks would see Mary, their bloodied Mary, take the risk. Get things moving.

They needed to see one of us seal the deal—me or Levi. See us save her and take what we needed. She was their Mary, had been so from that first white moment, bringing light to the darkness in the office, where they had been abandoned.

One of the Guards, the one with the nerve-agent cannon, sent two canisters at the Auditorium Building, their basso grunts like hooting owls as their ejecta smokestreamed toward the building. As I’d thought, the agent clouds were cohesive. They vented up into the opened windows, before the wind dispersed them, on the second and third floors, through which Salvage was firing. The break in the firefight bought the Guard a minute to address the girls.

Aleph Party, on Levi’s command, fired the grenade launcher over the Humvee toward the building, between the Guard and Salvage, to divert their attention.

We had to hurry. There might have been another demolitions squad worming through the underground. The Jacks had made enough for several vehicles, but they didn’t know how much would be used. If there was another squad, they’d blow a new hole in the road, taking people down into the darkness to live dead forever with flowers that wouldn’t die. Zunis and Greeks and kids from Slade, trading all the final answers with the oracle. Giving them back, maybe, at Delphi. Asynchronously. Offering answers from the future, when things Collapsed, to the classical ancients waiting patiently to be as intelligent as we were, at twelve years old, in our seventh-grade classroom, reading
Mythology
and
Native Americans
.

The answers hadn’t made sense to the ancients because they’d been for us, in the future. They just built meaning from the abstracta. It was a trick psychics used.

Mary was ready. She got the jump. She shot one Guard through the back of the neck when he turned around to flinch at Aleph Party’s exploding cocktail. When he turned around
to help other people at all times
.

If I could, I would have just made them the offer. To give us what we want, or die. But they would have just killed us. We could …
take no chances…
.

Four grabbed the other Guard’s gun, the one who loaded the RPG and the nerve-agent cannon, just so he couldn’t use it. She wasn’t hurting him, which was Secondary.

The driver slid out of his cockpit, taking a moment to help while Salvage battled the gas in the building. When he turned to shoot Four, to shoot Mary, I ran through the burning-Humvee-smoke-hydra. I emerged from underground, wearing goggles and a respirator from the art section in the bookstore. I wore all-black, was painted black, to be part of the smoke, the power-outage darkness. I was not myself in the tall grass outside the fort.

On the roof, everyone had become Primary. The Jacks opened fire on the gunner in the back of the Humvee. I opened fire on the driver. When Four let go, Mary opened fire on the other Guard. We all brought fire, unbound. Prometheus, every one.

It was a tight fit, the four of us and one Jack in the Humvee. The other Jacks had trucks in the parking lot on the Oak Street side of the bookstore. They had shells over the beds. They had a half-assed mobile lab, which they had used to finish priming the explosives once they were on site.

They looked too young for this. Eighteen, tops.

“Did you have another rendezvous point? A Place for falling back?” I asked our Jack. “Where your Primaries would have gone when they split?”

“No,” he said, flushed and breathing firm. Safe and confident in here with us. “It was just back to our Place. Our Group’s Place. It was agreed on by the Leaders.”

We were going to need the rest of their equipment, their full labs. Their Primaries were probably just as young as these.

I drove the Humvee away from the Auditorium Building, up Meyer. It made sense. Now Salvage could come together in the heart of campus, to do away with whoever, whatever, had killed White’s last words. But not us. We had the last words, were strong now. I wouldn’t throw resources away on a fight that didn’t even need us.

Now, with the Humvee, I had what I needed to make sure it didn’t become real. We were strong now. No one would end up alone. It was just more noise.

There was nothing wrong with the
Book
.

Levi turned around. “What you did was right.”

In the streets around us, on the way back, people were organizing. Not Salvage, just people with flashlights and baseball bats. Guns. Neighbors and families forming posses.

Already.

They stared, standing in their front yards and along their sidewalks, as I threaded the caravan down Meyer. The street was tight here, where tract houses closed in on one another. The trees lining the road had formed a tunnel of leaves and branches that blocked out the sky.

Levi jumped channels on his walkie-talkie—he was monitoring the Salvage bands as we took the long way back, which would take us past another electrical substation, along a longhorn pasture, and eventually back to Broadway.

“It’s the Lull,” he said, looking up. “Most of the civil responders are on the north side of town.”

“How big’s the response?”

These weren’t Salvage people. They weren’t organizing, they were congregating, tightening the suburban herd against the predators in the tall grass. Which meant that the violence and the vandalism and the initial terror had subsided enough that they’d risk meeting one another around tripod barbecue grills and the backs of their bed-lined pickup trucks. That they’d let themselves feel strong. Some of them were arguing, screaming and shoving and still too scared to commit acts of violence. They were arguing over the spray-paint sigils on the sidewalks, the crib-speak ideograms marking which houses would be directly targeted. When Salvage brought the fire. After the grid had been fully dismantled. It had been mapped, carefully, over months, by the hive-mind—determining what should burn first, to Clear the city in just the right way to best effect Salvage-only survival. The unprepared would be left only with indefensible half neighborhoods and ruined plumbing lines. They would starve, or they would leave, and Salvage would take the town.

“It’s not clear,” Levi said. “Conflicting reports.”

But these people didn’t know what the sigils meant, and they argued. Some because their houses hadn’t been marked, others because theirs had. Most because they’d been too scared to go outside and stop the taggers as they painted their way down the dark street. Earlier. They would have excuses about how, if the taggers had done just
this thing
more, they would have charged across the lawn and beat the hell out of them.

“You worried?” Levi asked. “Being out here?”

“Not now,” I said. “Not with this firepower. With the Jacks. We’ll get out all right.”

Levi looked at the people in the street. “They’ll be torn apart, standing around like this when things pick back up.”

“Yeah.”

One cluster, near the intersection of the substation access road, shouted something at us. They worked up the mob-nerve to approach the Humvee in the street, slowing us down. Began slapping at it, calling for protection. The substation hadn’t burned yet, but I could see the bobbing licks of moving flashlights along its girders and guy lines. Behind the station’s stone fence. Salvage was in there, worming.

The other people stepped off their porches. They left their yards and driveways and shambled slowly toward us, toward my now stopped caravan with its gargling motors, its burned-diesel exhaust, and its off-road tires. Their ideas about the National Guard, about what it would do for them, had done for others, on TV in disasters past, drew them to us. We had become the mouth at the bottom of the whirlpool. We were the ones drawing things downstream from all parts of this neighborhood, which was all places to these people.

They were choking off my only way out.

I couldn’t take any chances here. The Jacks were behind us, in their smaller rigs, still scared as shit about the dark office and the dead Guards. Their headlights were painting the back of the Humvee with their unease. People were approaching them, too.

“Mary, open the fifty-cal up on the cluster at nine o’clock,” I said. “Four, load the ammunition belts.”

Levi set down the walkie-talkie and powered up the spotlight. He swung it in a slow arc, backward, lighting up houses and posses in a slow gaze all the way around the Humvee, across the caravan. He stopped on the cluster that had started all of this.

It took the girls a minute to figure out the gun.

“Set,” Mary finally said through the porthole, her voice muffled by the sheaves of metal between us.

“Fire at will.”

This street was a proto-Place, and its people a proto-Group. A mob.

Several of the Outsiders fell, immediately, when Mary opened up the .50-cal. I couldn’t tell if they’d been hit or were diving for cover. She only fired off a few seconds’ worth, but as the barrel climbed, propelled upward by its own force, the bullets ate giant holes in the sides of one of these soft houses. She blew the front door apart completely.

We would get better at keeping the barrel level.

The gathering mob, with its pocketknives in sheaths on its belts, with its ideas to get things together and get the neighborhood moving—it went back to a happenstance gathering of the unprepared. It fled back inside.