Noise (19 page)

She wore a tiny golden crucifix on a delicate chain.

I gestured at Mary. She took up position behind the woman. Weapon raised.

“How did you find us?” I asked.

“Please—” she said.

Mary chambered a round in her pistol.

“Answer the questions.”

“I just … followed you, off the highway.”

“You have a son.”

“Yes. We’ve been running.”

“Where is he?”

“Hiding.”

I looked at the now open loading bay door. At the line of mimosa trees along the southern fence. At the postal Jeeps in neat rows between us and the trees.

“Tell him it’s okay. Tell him to come out.”

She looked at me for a minute. I knew what she was seeing—young people, probably scared. She wouldn’t have approached until she got a look at Mary, watching the perimeter.

She called to him, and he came. Cargo pants, flat-top haircut. He had lacerations on his face, probably from running through greenbrier or something. He stood next to his mother.

I nodded at Mary. She adjusted her aim. Pointed her gun at the boy.

“Please,” the woman said.

“It’s a precaution,” I allowed Mary to say. “In case this is a trap. Is your son a price worth paying? For an ambush?”

Bloody Mary. After so much time sounding distance in the dark before mirrors I couldn’t see.

Just in time.

The woman cried, holding her son’s hand. He just stared at me.

“Who are you running from?”

“I—I don’t know. There are a lot of them. Men. They have a place somewhere … around. They have my sister, our car. My husband.”

I wasn’t worried about Levi. If there was a gang, Levi had the gear to make them burn.

I looked at her son. He wasn’t big. He was shaped like I had been at that age—tall, skinny. Sharp elbows and temples and fingerbones. He could be trained. He had probably been in the seventh grade. Before.

“What can you do?” I asked her.

She tucked her hair behind her ears. Cried a little less.

“I can cook. I know first aid. I know a lot about herbs.”

“What can you do with these herbs?”

“Lots of things.” She looked hopeful now.

Had she also ground strange things in ceramic bowls? Here in the Bible Belt? Had she wondered
What the fuck is going on?
Wondered why copal resin had more
soul
than frankincense? Wondered what to do with asafetida? With Dragon’s Blood oil? How to be a shaman, or what was so cool about pagans?

I looked at her crucifix. There’d been a time when I wore one, too—only, mine was just a cross. There’d been no little body of Jesus upon it. We were Baptists, after all. The cross was more important than the Christ.

“Things you wouldn’t expect,” she said. “That you wouldn’t know.”

What were you supposed to do with so much witch hazel?

I pulled the Jesus-paper out of my pocket and handed it to her. It was something, at least.

“Try me,” I said.

“FOUR”

SEC. “I,” SUBSEC. “C” (“TERM LIMITATION”)

[1] (i) Limit the length of the terms of your Senators and Final Leader. (ii) Punish those who do not relinquish their terms when they expire.

[2] (i) Militia Leaders are appointed by the Administration. As such, they are not elected and are not subject to term limitation.

I.D.

“MANDATORY MILITIA TRAINING”

[1] (i) All physically and mentally capable Members must undergo mandatory militia training. (ii) Further, all Members must provide themselves (or be provided) with arms. (iii) The reasoning behind this is twofold:

[2](i) Forbid the organization and congregation of paramilitia groups. (ii) Allow and encourage nonviolent demonstration.
(iii) Allow and encourage public debates, meetings, and reports.

“
FIVE
”

“ADDITIONS AND RECRUITMENT”

[1] (i) In the early period after your Arrival, you will have to rely on recruiters to secure worthwhile Additions to your Group. (ii) In time, as your Narrative expands into surrounding territories, Addition-seekers will, instead, come to you. Under these circumstances, you can reassign your recruiters to general intelligence gathering.

[2] (i) Recruitment and Addition will become vital to your prosperity for several reasons:

i
n the desert, you think about water. About the fields of dew-traps these Outsiders, these “moles,” had dug, to harvest moisture from the air. Alongside the farming plots they’d tilled. The moles whose Place this had been. Now the traps were just funnels of dust in the earth, the collectors under the obscured tarps like so many ant-lions, waiting. The soil rigs in the plots were being re-duned in different directions that better suited the wind, caused by the storm we had finally caught, driving west. The rain had been slight—the clouds weren’t ready—but it had been dragging a dust storm.

They were idiots. This shouldn’t have been their Place. The storms were no good. It should only have been a stop on the way.

We knew all about this Nike site—about all three parts of it. It was a derelict leftover from Project Nike—a missile defense program from 1950, when we worried about bombers at sixty thousand feet that would bring down the sky. The facilities themselves were much smaller than the larger parts.

Adam and I had traded two fifty-pound bags of flour and a twenty-five-pound bag of salt, which we took from L. D. Pizza, for a manifest of decommissioned facilities like this. It listed coordinates, conditions, current occupants. It used words like
kennel
and
hutch
, and came with a crib sheet for decoding all the terms.

You think about finding water, about keeping it. Creating a society around the maintenance of water. The philosophies and cultures it requires. It is its own way to the underworld, another door to a different immortality—faerie, perhaps. From the Germanic Old Country, the reflecting pools and grottoes and undersea realms. And of course, from Greece. The naiads and the nymphs. Water was a diviner’s lens in a bowl with essential oils. Another way to find the animal that is a better you than you.

Water is the collector, the dew-trap at the bottom of the tarp funnel—function as form, the Charybdis waiting. So many ways out. The darkness, the smoke, the holes in the earth. The mirrors and the water. The bullet from the gun in the hands of the mole who’d been ready, down here in the bunker. This was not an underworld because there were no flowers.

This site wasn’t far from Amaranth, relatively speaking. It was one of our options, a second-place on our way out. In case we needed one. We knew it would be occupied, like the others, which meant that, if we needed to go there, taking it would be primarily an exercise in vigilance. We hadn’t counted on the firepower we had now. We hadn’t counted on the Jacks and what they had cooked.

•   •   •

You think about lakes and reservoirs. About fly-fishing, which is hard. It’s an enterprise in the water, a father’s rite that sons had to learn. Over our five-day vacation, I caught one rainbow trout, which should have gotten away. In the water, the rubber waders sucked to your legs. A tight fit, a way to be in the water without it knowing, so you could take its fish.

Until, later in the summer, at the same campground, a fifteen-year-old son let the water in by accident, dipping his chest too low to the popping river, to swipe the net at the fish, and the waders became the naiad’s kiss, slipping down his chest, dragging him down, down to live dead forever in places with perfect flowers.

Sometimes, it is the sons, and not the fathers, who die.

The first time I saw a dust storm, I was out west with Her. It came upon the horizon like urban smog, a brown thing displacing the sky, a stain that could not be avoided. The red farmer’s earth had developed wings, moving in ways that defied normal motion. It swallowed the entire town, dragging it down. You wedged damp towels into doorjambs and window frames, but still your apartment smelled like dust. It smelled cold.

When it was gone, the dirt was piled in drifts like snow. From white to red. Something bloody on something not. Like Mary. Bloody Mary.

You think about Possum Kingdom Lake. Where my grandfather died before I met him, facedown in the water. Bobbing drunk and unconscious and drowning in the hollowed-out floor of the fishing cabin at the end of the pier, under the gooseneck lamps that sucked up the moths. He had a copy of Aristotle’s
Poetics
in
his pocket. But it’s not that simple. That wasn’t a philosophy for keeping water.

When the storm started, Levi managed to orient us, using a map and our GPS reader. By the time we were close to the Project Nike site, the storm was upon us.

My father had grown up in the red earth, out here in oil country. He and his brothers chased dust devils and stole produce and killed time. Which is what you did in farm-and-oil country. My grandfather’s truck was as silver as silicon. He was a rig man, a pumpjack man, and his truck is what kept him from the dust and the wind, circled with the other company men’s trucks—like wagons—to deflect the eddies in the wind that could turn them over. There was never any paint on the trucks because the sand blasted it off. No rust, no blood. No evidence of oil.

The moles’ Place housed a broadcast tower, a big, hulking digital thing—the only use that either the government or the private sector still had for the place. We picked up the ’cast on an FCC radio band, and it said “Stay in your homes. Obey law enforcement instruction” over and over and over, co-opting the Salvage repeat. We followed the tower’s blinking, bloody lights straight through the storm.

For Salvage, repetition was meaning. Things had to be ’cast, picked up, re-’ cast, looped and digitized and taken apart. They had to be jammed and spliced and rearranged so that the same things reappeared, over and over, in different ways. They had to be written, spray-painted, robbed of vowels, glyphed and tattooed.
They had to be burned out of their buildings,
taken
before they could be
stolen
. They had to be the very shirt off your back, so they could be given away, even if someone else had to
give
it for you. Salvage had to be sure that what it heard, what it said, was right. Hearing something, reading something, touching something again and again—as long as everyone else was getting it, too—made it right. Made it real.

If you only said something once, then you were just talking into the darkness, sounding distance. Making noise. Talking to hear yourself speak, like watching mirrors with the lights off.

The moles had an outpost, a converted entry station, but they weren’t ready for the fire we brought. In goggles and a mask, Silo opened them up with the .50-caliber, the dust slipping down his torso like water. It splashed into the Humvee, and we breathed through our shirt-masks. Penelope and Voice could handle the RPG well enough, masked against the storm. Mary gave them fire, with Luke’s grenade launcher, and Circe’s bombs took things apart.

This was how we made that Wall message real.

Merlin had learned to handle the nerve-agent cannon. Once through the outpost, we circled the caravan around the bunker’s bay doors, the massive elevator doors in the earth that took big things down or let missiles go up. We circled the trucks against the wind, like my grandfather had, and when Levi opened the door to the service stairs—for going underground and operating the elevator—Zero filled the Place with clouds of nerve agent.

It couldn’t have been real, but I made it so. Because we had fire, because we’d gone after the Humvee, to keep it from being real, we fucked ourselves from the get-go. Fore-damned. Fated.

I ordered the descent, waiting with Mary and Silo and Circe
in the Humvee as Levi took the rest to secure the Place. The vehicles swayed as the wind got under them. We couldn’t see the lights on the tower anymore.

Which made it my fault.

They cleared the moles out, with knives and the swords, to save ammunition. They kicked aside broken glass, let it swim on the concrete in the vinegar it had held, the preserved vegetables inside limp and colorless and exposed now. Tiny clouds of pickling spice, spilled from their canisters, climbed toward the gap between the bay doors so far overhead, drawn upward by the sucking winds, defying the rules of normal motion.

They piled the corpsed moles on the elevator, which still worked—a massive thing that we would use to bring down some of the caravan. They gave the moles to the wind, lifting dead things to the sky, in the storm. Like rabbis lifting golems, offering them up to receive the Breath of Life—the dust and the wind that began it all. They offered the moles to the red dirt, which is all
Adam
ever meant in Hebrew anyway.
Red
, from the God-breathed dirt that made him. The First Man in all this, before Mary, before the blood. Before anyone had to be sacrificed.