Noise (13 page)

I couldn’t see the lights inside the substation anymore.

We had to sleep. Likely, Salvage had blown at least one more substation. Somewhere. Thanks to fucking Chisolm.

We couldn’t leave before the Lull now, but it didn’t matter. We had the firepower to make people burn.

I thought about the Wailing Wall. About that message. It couldn’t have been real. I couldn’t have known then what it was warning me against, which meant the Wall couldn’t know. I couldn’t have tagged it.

What else hadn’t been real? Could we still trust Chance? Its from-the-grave messages?

Why did we take the Humvee?
one of my brains asked.
It was an unnecessary expenditure of energy. An unnecessary risk
.

Unless it was real.

Because we had come for answers. And the oracle talked back, to me, through that Wall. We had come to finish off the Last
Man, to finish off Chance. We didn’t need anyone anymore, and no one would end up alone.

“No one’s going to end up alone,” My father had said.

But we did. I did. Levi did.

Everyone ends up alone, standing in nongroups around hospital beds, watching fluids through valves. Watching people cease to be families.

The Jacks were resting in our living room. Smoking cigarettes, reading the
Book
in turns. A pair of them were out back, watching over the Humvee, which looked only like a bamboo grove now, after we’d camouflaged it.

Two of them were sitting apart from the others—Four’s girl and the Jack who’d been in the Humvee with us. He had an arm around her, and she was leaning in to his shoulder. They had that slouch. That posture between two kids, when their parents aren’t around and they can put their hands where they like.

“Where is the Place,” I asked the one who called himself Worm. “Where you were going to regroup?”

He traded a glance with Four’s girl. “I don’t think … sir … that we should go there. Even for our gear.”

Sir
.

“Where is it?” Mary asked.

“It’s the high school,” he said.

I thought about it. Levi and I had talked about the high school before. Only two ways in and out. Narrow, mischief-deterring windows. But those windows didn’t face outward. They were recessed into the exterior walls, and they looked at each other. We guessed you could see some of what went on beyond
the campus from those windows, but not much. It would make a bad Place because it would be necessarily nearsighted, except for what you could monitor from the roof. It would be overconfident.

“Why shouldn’t we go there?” Levi asked.

The kid looked down. Like he was ashamed. “Because—there’re too many Groups there.”

“What?”

“There’re at least six. Maybe more.”

Several Groups in one Place.

“So it’s a mess?”

“Yeah.”

“We can use that to our advantage.”

I dropped a hand on his shoulder. Stood up to go do Something Important. “We’ll get the gear, Worm. We’ll get it out.”

But we had to sleep.

“TWO”

SEC. “I,” SUBSEC. “C,” PROCEDURE “II”

(“THE SECOND PHASE”)

(cont’d)

[5] (i) Leaving your urban center by wheeled vehicle is likely to be difficult—most highways will be congested beyond use by accident sites, abandoned vehicles, or roadway brigandry. (ii) Use alternate routes. (iii) Avoid interstate highways—use old state-controlled alternatives. (iv) Pre-Event, take the time to learn the whereabouts of nearby paramilitary groups, which may include religious or philosophical sects, racial supremacists, or other paralegal organizations. (v) Avoid routes that will take your Group past these places.

[6] (i) Do not stop to render aid to Outsiders. (ii) Stop to render aid for your own Members only after scout vehicles have ensured the security of the area. (iii) If the security of the area cannot be ensured, deploy your excursion Party on a reconnaissance and assassination mission. (iv) Take no chances. (v) If your Group must appeal to other travelers for aid, minimize the number of Members exposed when doing so, as it is likely that the Member flagging for help will come under weapons or debris fire. (vi) Conceal your Group as much as possible. (vii) Other motorists are more likely to help a single person or a small Group than a large one. (viii) Be prepared to ambush those who stop to render aid.

[7] (i) Expect roadblocks. (ii) If a roadblock catches your pilot crew by surprise, then there is a possibility that your vehicle will, in turn, catch at least some of the roadblock crew by surprise. Use your vehicle as a weapon in this
instance. (iii) As soon as possible, open fire or deploy your Party to neutralize the roadblock crew. (iv) You will likely sustain casualties, and the vehicle will almost certainly be rendered inoperable. In a desperate situation, the sacrifice of the first vehicle may ensure the passage of the second.

[8] (i) Do not stop for rest. (ii) Alternate your crews if necessary. (iii) Proceed directly to your Place. (iv) Stopping at residences to Forage will likely result in death, for each will be its own siege warfare situation. (v) Only unattended fields of produce or grain are worthy of Forage. (vi) Under these circumstances, keep the vehicles constantly ready. (vii) Do not turn off their engines, even to refuel.

[9] (i) Expect resistance in every location. (ii) When you reach your Place, expect resistance.

h
ave you decided?” Four asked. Levi and I had decided to let her do this. To make her do this. We needed to commit her fully.

Four’s girl spoke for the Jacks. “Yes.”

We were in a line: Levi, Mary, Four, and I. The Jacks were in another line, standing across from us in the living room. Fluff and Edmund were weaving and rubbing the Jacks’ legs. They didn’t care about this.

It was a game of Red Rover, only we were letting the Jacks call themselves out, instead of doing it for them. We were making them betray their old selves to the line of linked arms across the field, where they’d be knocked off their asses and kicked out of the game.

“Circe,” Four’s girl said. Who knew how many names she’d taken before this, if she’d taken nicknames. If she’d tried out several new names once she joined her first Group, settling at last on whatever she’d called herself. We didn’t care—didn’t want to know.

Levi wrote the new name down on a stenographer’s pad.
It wasn’t for anything—we wouldn’t even keep it. But we wanted them to see us taking note. Making things official.

“Next,” Four prompted.

“Matthew.”

Mary looked at him. It didn’t sound new.

“From the Bible,” he said. “The Gospels.”

“We know,” I said.

I looked at Levi. In the Bible, Matthew had also been called Levi.

He nodded.

Next.

“Mark.”

Another Gospel. They were probably close. Had been Before. Like Adam and me.

We’d have to watch that.

Next.

“Penelope”

then

“Silo”

and Worm said

“Merlin”

but then another said

“God.”

We stopped.

“God?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“No.”

“What—”

“No.”

“But, it’s mine. I chose. You said I get to choose.”

“Choose something else.”

“Why?”

We all looked at him.

“Because it’s stupid,” I told him. “We’re not playing some game here. I don’t know what you think you can do with ‘God,’ but it won’t work out the way you think. The way we need it to.”

“It’s full of the wrong ideas,” Levi offered, playing Good Cop, “about what it means to be a new you. A better you.”

“It will fail you, which is us,” Four said.

I looked at her.

“Fine,” God said. “I’ll be Zero.”

“Next.”

“Pump.”

Next.

“Voice.”

Last.

“Luke.”

So there were three of them. Matthew, Mark, and Luke. We’d have to be sure. Make them realize, like God, that we weren’t playing games.

There was an occult logic to High School Parking. Not in the lots themselves, but among the drivers. There was a tradition, among students, regarding the esoteric orders and hierarchies of filling the lots. The meaning of self in a suburban high school, where the kids drove cars their parents bought, trading fender benders during their lunch-hour release the same way they had once traded baseball cards.

Visibility was important to cracking the codes—the ciphers—of behavior and movement in a parking lot. Could your peers see your assertion of self, your car, as they paced their ways toward the two sets of student-containing doors? There was never, in any school, a direct path between the doors.

Or were you too far back, in the hinterland? In some back-lot wasteland that delayed arrival and departure and the escape for lunch. It was a competition for control of resources—namely, the narrow lanes in and out of the lot. How quickly could you enact your Exit Strategy, to get yourself and your friends out? How well could you be seen doing this? Could you be the one with the fast car, who can do the thing, who can get people out, out, out?

We decided to obey the barricades. Someone in the Jacks’ old high school had taken the sawhorsed, orange-painted traffic barricades, stenciled to read
SECURITY
with black aerosol paint, from the storerooms where they were kept between football games, school plays, and dances. Before Everything, the barricades emerged to usher traffic in new directions, after normal school hours, when the daylight rules of parking no longer applied. When we were no longer allowed to go to the same places, in the same ways, as we were when the
body politic
was ruled only by students. We preferred it our way—having parents around, after normal hours, changed everything. Because we had it all figured out.

The arrangement of the barricades, approaching the lanes into and out of the parking lots, looked chaotic. I couldn’t tell if that was intentional, or if it evidenced different Groups enacting different strategies of perimeter defense. The point was that it would deliver Outsiders into the parking lot in the fashion those inside had deemed best.

Playing along, following the barricades, was part of the Plan. We hadn’t brought the Humvee. Levi was back at the House of Cards, monitoring ’casts. Those that were left, anyway. He had Penelope on the walkie-talkie. Silo and Zero were monitoring his perimeter. We wanted to look like we were petitioning for
Addition, or offering to establish New Trade. We didn’t want these Groups’ nascent Administrations to be stressed by our presence.

For Jon and me, at our high school, parking science had been more than the struggle for the right spot. It had been about power, and social authority, and what was given you from On High—what you couldn’t change. Like Calvinism, perhaps. Like predestination, and learning to live happily while being poor and foredamned, which we studied in World History II.

Because we were sophomores, we had a lower place on the Great Chain of Being. We couldn’t park in the main lot, which was reserved for juniors and seniors. There were already too many of them, because things were on the upswing then—lots of jobs, so lots of new families in the suburbs, buying cars for their children. Getting them “situated.”

We’d brought the Jacks’ trucks. I was in one cab, driving in the point position, Circe riding shotgun beside me. Matthew, Mark, and Luke were in the now emptied bed behind us, obscured from view by the camper shell. It had been Circe’s truck. Judging by the decals on the back window, she had spent a lot of her time in the Future Farmers of America. Probably breeding mini lop rabbits and hauling feed for class projects to the school district’s ranch outside of town. My sister had been in the FFA, and she had done things like tattoo the rabbits’ ears with a dyed-and-needled hole punch. She had marked them with a single letter, like a pointillist graffito-stencil—her first initial. The mark of She Who Was All Things to her rabbits. She had done things like mix fertilizers under faculty supervision. She had participated in
farm-risk-assessment assignments, like how much grain in one silo will cause spontaneous grain-dust combustion. Volunteer firefighters had helped her and the other students put out the fires in their miniature silos, and I had stood with my mother, with the other families, and watched the little buildings burn.

It made sense. Circe had to have learned how to cook somewhere, and in the FFA she’d have access to things like sodium nitrate and potassium chloride. My sister had spent a semester in a work-study program about dairy farm maintenance. She’d learned to use nitric acid to clean the scabbed deposits from the vacuum lines that milked the cows.

Circe would have needed nitric acid, too. The recipe called for it. Some adolescents join gangs, some smoke. Some cook dynamite.

There had been a lottery to get a parking sticker in the overflow lot, which was behind the football fields. I had not won the right to the lot, but Jon had, so we pooled our resources. His access and my car. Our lives became about arrival time. We awoke before sunrise, made time to stop for donuts at the shop around the corner from our housing development. It had gone up in a little strip mall long after we’d stopped using our fort. After we’d given up on the grocery store that had displaced us. There were even fewer tall grasses in that field then.

Despite Merlin’s concerns, it wasn’t so odd that there was more than one Group in the school—even if it was a mistake. There always had been. Sophomores, juniors, seniors—each having Placed the school themselves. Each class enacting different politics, oblivious to the others because the student body was too
large. You couldn’t struggle for power beyond your caste—it would spread your resources too thin. It was illogical, for the rules of the Great Chain of Being were inviolate. One might as well have been scheming against God, to get rid of the idea of The Elect, and predestination, and being fucked from the get-go as a commoner without the right name.