Noise (15 page)

He waved us into a classroom—

Part of the exchange program was to spend time in other schools. A small college in Budapest, a satellite school in Vienna. Some art co-op in Florence. Or something. The point being, to demonstrate how much harder it was to go to school somewhere else, however hard we thought it was at home. No one had told us about relative measure, cultural normativity, and the problem with seeing something foreign at all, since it is necessarily domestic once it hits your brain
.

—So, I wasn’t surprised. Neither did Mary seem to be, but Four stayed outside, with Circe. She couldn’t go in.

“Hey,” Promo called to one of the others in the classroom. This one was neither masked nor painted, and he had to stop stitching the wound in his patient’s arm to look up.

“Where the hell’s Bob?” Promo asked.

The surgeon shrugged. “Recon.”

His patient was laid atop three desks shoved together to make a bed. He wasn’t moving. Others were waiting against the wall, their faces obscured by yellow or white bandannas. None of these wore black. They waited quietly, patiently, without moving, their heads slumped against their chests. A few were leaning against each other, which I remembered—boys and girls using their shoulders to flirt, when they were free to lounge where they liked during the lunch hour. It was a way they could date, without the hassle, because they were just “friends.” The contact made them so, and a few would later fuck, when they found themselves in the same community college, having elected not to go off to some university, but to stay. Because there was a good reason. There was always a good reason—

They had tools, the men in the factory at the top of that hill
,
somewhere in northern Italy. Where they used industrial lathes to carve alabaster vases, which ended up as pencil holders or jewelry boxes for our parents, when we got back to Texas, or Indiana, or wherever. After my father died, I took back the one I had bought for him. I Salvaged it. The workers had alabaster dust and buckets of lubricant and cigarettes around flammable things, but it didn’t matter. The only thing they might burn was the whole damn hill
.

—These CLO.WN surgeons had dentist’s tools, which they would have gotten, no doubt, from some grocery store—where you could get those things. They’d taken them from—

the bastards who’d taken the land
outside the fort.
Who’d acquired the tall grasses and invaded for resources
.

—The surgeons had ceramics tools and Dremel tools wired into car batteries.

A different surgeon was mapping a different patient with a greasepaint marker. He was making sigils, and identifying lines, and outlining important parts. He was marking the areas where he’d missed, with the syringe lying on the desk beside him, when he’d practiced stabbing his victim in the heart, so he’d be ready in case one of his Group’s Primaries suffered heart failure. The school nurse kept one of these syringes under lock, just in case.

I wasn’t surprised that he’d removed all of her clothes. He couldn’t very well have begun exploring, with those
lathes and tools
, her curves and whitenesses and
alabaster
skin, without doing so. He couldn’t otherwise determine the appropriate
pitch and camber to make vases and penholders and miscellaneous receptacles
. He couldn’t know what to do next time, when she would be alive and when it would be a matter of romance, and not teaching himself battlefield surgery—

One of the girls, from our school, had come to use her shoulders in the room that I shared with one of the other guys. She had come in her
pajamas, to make contact, because it was after hours, and she could do what she wanted here
.

—Here, there was a new politics, because there were no parents around to fuck the Great Chain of Being. To mess with the order of things. I didn’t know enough to be anything other than casual, to pretend this was normal, so I only glanced at the security guard’s corpse in the corner. They would have taken his radio after they began Arriving at the school, after the Event. They’d had to consider their Place enemy territory, and he was only the first of many on which they’d have to learn to play doctor.

Because what else could they have done? The nurse’s office was in someone else’s territory. It wasn’t part of their Place.

Later, we crossed the border from the catacombs into Austria, where we necessarily said good-bye. We had only been a Group for a short time, some weeks, in Italy, where we’d established our own body politic, where we’d been parented by only two trip coordinators. In Italy, we’d been allowed to do what we wanted with our currency. We’d been allowed to wander the Grand Canal in Venice, where, in one instance, the girl who had worn pajamas into my room had been chased by Outsiders. Two of our Primaries managed to chase them off, but not before she fled straight into the brackish water of a back-alley canal. We’d been allowed to sneak onto hotel rooftops, to smoke cigarettes at night and sit in closer proximity than we would during the daylight. I’d found my way into a bar, at one point, to order a glass of wine. Which is what my old fantasy-book heroes and Romantic idols would have done. While they smoked their pipes, which I’d already learned how to do.

•   •   •

We couldn’t have a guide around us for this operation, so we killed Promo.

I’d gotten the signal from Mark. Promo was going to take us in the wrong direction, when we reached the end of the hall, so we needed to solidify ourselves, to free us up from being found out, or forced to actually Trade intel—

We were on our way to a small town outside Vienna, where I stayed with a family in a hillside château. One of the surrounding mountains was missing an entire, symmetrical wedge of trees. We were told the devil had taken them
.

—I could have done it. I could have ordered Mary to do it. I could have ordered her to order one of the Jacks to do it, but she needed to order it herself. All of this needed to happen.

Matthew borrowed a knife and a last-ditch syringe from Pump—

From the man who owned the château, for a hike through the trees, around the property
.

—Matthew used the knife to cut
the sticky greenbrier when it grabbed at his sleeves
, and he watched in the dark,
on the way back, as the man pointed to the slab where he and his son were going to build a family chapel. Before the son died. Before I came home to a dying father
.

—Before he could rethink things, Matthew pulled his shirttail over his face and then cut Promo across the arm, so he would turn his head. He jammed the syringe into Promo’s neck and depressed the plunger.

We left Promo around the corner. We wanted it to look like a border skirmish, and here, he wasn’t far from the morgue ward, where he could be used to teach his surgeons better ways of bringing broken things back together.

Circe watched Luke watching Mark watching Matthew. Seeing things in reverse. Mary cupped Matthew’s face in her
alabaster palm. She took the knife, cleaned it on Promo’s shirt, and gave it back to him. She took Promo’s pistol and shoved it behind her waistband, the barrel in line with the crack of her ass. I wondered about Matthew’s hobbies, about his two friends, about the new girl and reducing oneself, one’s friendships, by sex. I wondered if he knew yet what a woman’s fingers on his face might mean.

“What you did was right.”

We ducked into a dark classroom when some skirmish broke out. In some distant part of the school. It was difficult to gauge the number of participants because the gunfire echoed, and no doubt, many combatants weren’t using firearms. They may have been fighting to find out who took the fire from Prometheus.

I knew what Luke was thinking, looking at Circe. Looking at the grenade asleep in its sling—

When I had met Her. After Jon had met
his
Her. When things changed among all three of us—Adam and Jon and me—my worries shifted. Sex was everything, and that meant, every time, that She and I were making grenades of our own, between us. Even if we used things like condoms and gels, because we were terrified of what we might make together. We’d had scares of our own, because we were too stupid to recognize the difficulty in creating children. We knew only our fear
.

—so I knew what Luke was thinking, staring at that sling, at Circe’s unbound hair. He knew the first Circe to use the name had given birth to a minotaur. He wondered how he could love such a thing as she could make. As he made with her.

•   •   •

When we finally arrived, in what had originally been the corridor of the Sons of Man, we ran. Mark took the point position on my orders, to direct our course, and we ran across enemy territory that had new lines, new cardinal measures, that the Jacks didn’t even understand anymore. They’d been away too long, and territory shifted too readily in the high school. There was an explosion downstairs. In the half-light of a passing window, we saw the buckets of fertilizer burning on the football field.

Another Party found us, running in their own direction, away from their own things. Their faces were obscured by black-on-white paisley-and-filigree bandannas. They lifted the same guns we did, there in the corridor.

“Wait—” Circe said. “—Ishmael.”

They lowered their guns. We didn’t.

He stepped out from behind his ghost-faced escort.

“It’s us,” she said. “What the fuck?”

“Who the hell are these others?” Ishmael asked.

“Additions,” Luke said, a butane lighter between his fingers. He stood just behind Circe’s sling.

“Where the
fuck
were you guys?” Matthew asked.

Ishmael sent a runner back the way they’d come. He slipped his bandanna off his face. He was pretty, with black hair and blue, blue eyes. They drew in the weak window-light. He looked surprised to have caught his Secondaries, floating downstream.

“We were … caught.” He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. You were supposed to wait.”

The way Circe was looking at him—this wasn’t just “Ishmael.”

He looked at us. “Lower your guns, assholes.”

I didn’t send any signals. I let Mary lower her guns on her own. I couldn’t look like a Leader here.

“You didn’t
fucking
come,” Circe said.

“I came back,” Ishmael said.

He was their Leader. He would have been the one to convince them to start cooking. Got them into Salvage. First Circe, then Luke—who would have brought Matthew and Mark, even though they
weren’t invited to Adam’s house to play D&D
.

“You … fuck you, Jason,” Circe said.

Ishmael reeled.

He said “Morgan.”

“We were nearly blown apart by the Guard,” Luke said. “By our own fucking trap.”

And Luke had stayed with Circe in the darkness.

“Shut up, Carson,” Jason said to Luke.

Wait
.

Ishmael was probably the one with the fast car, the one who could get her out, out, out of this shit town with its shit farms and shit people and shit family businesses. Its shit college students and their shit venues because there was nothing to do underage but hang out on the Strip and sell pot.

Circe’s hands were shaking. “I can’t believe—”

I imagined that Luke had listened to her—in algebra class, maybe—when she might have complained about how easily jealous Ishmael could become, for what idiotic reasons. Luke might have listened, commiserated, because he would have been competing for resources, namely the ways in-and-out of Circe.

I didn’t want to hear these names.

“You know what, Jason,” Luke said, stepping out from behind Circe. “You know
fucking what?
”

But Circe wasn’t an overflow lot. There wasn’t some back road upon which Luke could arrive early to effect his exit strategy. There’s only one way underground, and that’s the direct path, in
front of the school. Its entrances stoplighted by things like boyfriends and the order of authority in the Group.

Ishmael grabbed Luke and shoved him against the wall.

And when Ishmael had convinced Circe to cook dynamite, she convinced Luke, who followed her underground because what other fucking option did he have?

They’re not wearing paint
.

Luke shoved back. With his knife.

No
.

“Hiram!”

There was thunder coming up the stairs behind us.

Luke took a bullet to the face, from Ishmael’s posse. Pump took one to the chest. I hadn’t had time to create histories for all of them yet. I hadn’t had time to care that they would die, which would have to be good enough.

Four grabbed Circe and pulled her against the wall. Mary and I
murdered
the other Sons of Man—the rest of Ishmael’s posse. We didn’t
eliminate
them because we were using the wrong words. The wrong names. We were our wrong selves here. This was wrong.

Merlin and Voice ducked into the chemistry classroom. I saw Voice throw a chair through the window. Matthew climbed onto the fire escape, waiting to be the first one down. With the gear, from six Groups, from a lot of clandestine fucking Salvage, when it was handed to him. Mark was watching Matthew not watching Luke.

I sent Mary through, to see to the gear, with an armful of the Sons of Man’s guns. I waited with Four in the hallway, waiting for the storm climbing the stairs. She planted a slow kiss on Morgan’s forehead, who stared at her with wide, unseeing eyes.

They lit the grenade and threw it down the hallway. When it exploded, it tore the doors from the lockers and collapsed the
ceiling. Born without a father. Born out of wedlock. There was no option but to destroy it. I knew this.

We heard the storm screaming as the shrapnel flew into it, defying the laws of normal motion.

We weren’t wearing paint. They were using their old names.

What we did was wrong.

“THREE” (“ARRIVAL”)

(cont’d)

[6] (i) Should the Party encounter potential Additions, these Additions must present a worthwhile contribution to the Place, such as necessary knowledge, valuable equipment, or the capability of physical labor. (ii) Accepting Secondary Membership Additions will be determined by the number of such Members already in your Group. (iii) The precise ratio of Secondary to Primary members will vary from Group to Group, based on such factors as the martial stability of surrounding territory, the abundance or availability of resources, or the need for manual-labor workforces. (iv) The Leader should not authorize a Forage for others’ supplies, should the Party encounter individuals with such in their possession. (v) The reasoning behind this is that now that you have Arrived at your Place, it is important not to establish military authority on the idea of wanton barbarity, for this can lead to divisions of power between combatant-Members and noncombatants. (vi) You must maintain your combatants as a militia, not an army, for they must be as invested in the equality of the Group and the Place as are working noncombatants.