Noise (8 page)

Would there be sex? I knew terms like
sky-clad
and
Great Mother
, but I’d spent too much time in Southern Baptist churches growing up. I wasn’t an atheist yet. Not then. I liked the … respectful anarchy of the neo-pagan movement. I’d read about it on the Internet.

I tried very hard.

I was losing patience. When the Nine blew, Ruth went into hysterics. The mobs hadn’t broken her, not the trip here or the Strip-rat. What we’d told her about Salvage. None of that. It was hearing the explosion, feeling the fizzed air pressure, like a TV on mute that you can still
feel
.

The explosion hadn’t been as concussive as we’d thought, but afterward, we could hear transformers groaning all up and down Broadway. Bright lights, big city, and then they popped, one at a time. That was it for the yellow-brick road. The Wailing Wall had been right, and we were left with darkness and smoke.

After a minute, we led the girls back into the living room. Opened the blinds, let them look at the Northern Lights. Mary stood at the window, uninterested in Ruth’s fit, her no-longer-painted face occasionally violet. Green. Red. The substation burned silently, throwing its alien-hued fires a hundred feet or
more in the air. We could see them clearly, even though we were on the west side of the square.

For now, there were no screeching tires, no shouting crowds, no one running down Broadway. There was the silence and the light and a Slade riding the first wave of its trip-fantastic into a very bad near-future.

For now there was Mary at the window, Levi setting new batteries into the black-and-white. Colors phased across the wall, across our upright suit of imitation armor, hammered out of tin. Across our gaming console. Across the map of West Texas we’d tacked onto the wall—the Place noted with a giant safety pin, likely farms nearby that we could Forage marked with multi colored pushpins.

“Ruth, you can shut up, or you can leave,” I said.

“How long will it last?” Mary asked.

“Five minutes. Maybe ten,” Levi said.

“
What?
Fuck you! You can’t throw me out there.”

“The fuck I can’t.”

“Why is it so colorful?”

“Fine, I’ll take my shit and go. You psychos can play army all you want.”

“We’re not sure. Salvage just knows what happens, in most cases, not why.”

“No, your stuff stays. It’s ours now. It belongs to the Group.”

“What
group?
”

Mary turned around, limned by the light like some holy nimbus. I looked at her for a minute, expecting something meaningful.

“This is fucked up,” Ruth said. “I’ll call the police.”

She picked up one of her packs. I couldn’t remember which it was—her personal gear or the metalworking tools. I stood up. Behind me, Levi had stopped working on the black-and-white.
He handed me one of the swords. Mine, judging by the blood. He had stabbed, not swiped, and the wounds had sucked his blade clean.

“Drop the pack.” I was standing in front of the door.

“Or what? You’ll kill me?”

“Ruth—”

“I can’t believe you brought me here, Jo. What the fuck!”

“Yes,” I said.

“Yes, what?”

“Yes, I’ll kill you.”

She was calmer now. Remembering, I guess. Thinking of the rat in the street by the Strip. “You’re not wearing your … your paint.”

“Ruth, sit down.”

“Drop the pack, Ruth.”

“We have to stay together.”

“You have to make a decision.”

I convinced myself that my totem was an eagle. I was into eagles. I was part Indian. An Eagle Scout. I made fetishes out of grapevine and raffia and gave them to my friends like some shaman.

The eagle was a better me than me. My totem.

Afterward, we went to Cassandra’s house. The guy on the Navajo rug was her husband. I hadn’t caught that. We smoked pot and talked about gaming. They gamed, too, and thought I might like to join.

Was that it? It’s just what I decide? The totem is what I decide?

Was that spiritual? I was being open-minded.

What did it mean that I had bottles of unrefined frankincense at home? A baggie of Dittany-of-Crete. One mandrake root. A mortar-and-pestle I’d bought in an online auction. The Southern Baptist Convention disallowed female preachers, and incense came in colored sticks from the drugstore, not in roots and weird powders. What I knew was clearly not what I knew.

I made my own potions, my own blends, finally a fucking shaman. I followed recipes from a book and highlighted words like
empower
and
release
. I had done this in the evening when Adam had class. The first year. Trying to figure things out.

Ruth let Mary sit her down. I lowered the point of the sword.

“You need to keep an open mind about this.”

It was quiet, even after the Northern Lights faded. The university would be dark, too, but they had generators. We had one, but it wasn’t for Slade. It was for later.

The jammer had disappeared from the Morse ’zine. We weren’t sure when the next substation would go.

“All right,” Ruth said.

“All right.”

“I get it.”

“It’s all equal. Once we get out.”

“Yeah.”

“Nobody’s going to tell you what to do, except the whole of the Group.”

“I get it.”

“But—”

“I get it.”

“You get it?” I got up and grabbed the Strip-rat’s folded clothes. I tossed them onto her lap. “You get it?”

“Yeah.”

“The Group is everything. Outsiders are our enemies. Predators. People who will take what we have, however they can. They’re going to become desperate.”

“I get it.”

She tucked her hair behind her ears. Mary was sitting cross-legged next to me, between me and Levi.

“Do you have family or something? Out … there? At this place?” Ruth asked.

“Something.”

“Where is it?”

I looked at Levi.

“If we tell you, you have no choice. You either come along, or we have to neutralize you before we leave.”

I looked back at Ruth.

“I get it. Where is it?”

Even Mary was looking.

I pointed to the safety pin.

There.

“Is anyone else coming?”

“No.”

“What about, like, your parents?”

“Don’t ask about our parents.”

“No one else is coming.”

The fires didn’t start immediately after Salvage cut the power to the yellow-brick road. We waited for the schedule ’zine, the
Morse bulletin, to re-’cast. From the beginning. Broadway had some time left. The fires would be burning out in the Red Light District now. There were only rumors of prostitutes there, but everyone had a story about “seeing” one. The gangs were there, and they’d been first with the fires. With one another.

The square was a column of smoke, but without any wind it only went upward. A wall with nothing to enclose. It
was
the enclosure. Whoever had Placed the old courthouse was in some shit now. I stood on the porch, in the shadow next to the 1890s door, while Levi did a check around the house. The smoke was only some two or three hundred yards distant. I didn’t hear any shouting from there anymore.

There was a part of me, the part that had crawled through tunnels between storm drains, that had loved the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in Johnny-come-lately TV syndication, that wanted to step through that smoke, into a land of the dead. To make sense of an underworld utopia. I was in the seventh grade when we read Edith Hamilton’s
Mythology
. The River Lethe, Nepenthe, Cerberus, and Hades. I sometimes confused the Greek and the Roman. I didn’t understand the living fascination with a world of perfected dead.

The traffic had mostly died. The intersection of Broadway and Sycamore, on the other side of the house next to ours, was filled with smashed, abandoned, and gun-shot cars. It made a good roadblock.

The new Slade was a quiet one. The delinquents were out of sight.

“Clear,” Levi reported quietly.

I nodded from the dark. “All right—get your two hours, then.” Rest in shifts. Just like the night-watch rotation of every Party in every game of every D&D campaign we’d ever played. We usually got bored around sixth level and rolled up a new Group
of characters. Sixth level brought the real power, when you could
do
something with your mages and dwarves. With your paladins.

Things started to suck with too much power, so we always started over.

“Two hours,” Levi repeated. He climbed the steps. Looked at the smoke with me for a minute.

“Girls are eating.”

I nodded.

“What do you think about Ruth?”

I looked at him. “Works metals. Soldering and all that.”

“That justifies the pain in the ass. I guess.”

I smiled. “How’d we end up with two lesbians? In this?”

“Ruth, too?”

I looked at him funny.

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Yeah.”

I was fourteen the first time I gamed. I had been invited. Adam and I had a mutual friend from our junior high school, so we met. Adam was the Dungeon Master. I brought Chuck and Jon—

“You all right?” Levi asked.

—I played a rogue. I named him Kirn Steelhawk, and he wore masks and took false names. I played well, so I was invited back—Chuck and Jon weren’t. My mom didn’t like that I was playing Dungeons & Dragons. Said it was satanic. Even though I’d just experienced God in the empty sanctuary of our church. I’d convinced myself of this. Desperately. I’d told my youth minister, and we’d all prayed our thanks together.

I’d even read
Mythology
, so I knew the difference—

“I’m all right.”

•   •   •

Mary lay down next to Levi. In Levi’s room, off the living room. It was smarter for them to rest in the same place. If one heard something, he or she would wake the other. They wouldn’t have to wait on Ruth and me to hear it, too.

Ruth was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the room, reading the
Book
by the black-and-white light. There didn’t seem to be much coming from Salvage now. I was waiting for a newscast, something stripped from somebody’s still-working digital, but Salvage was just repeating the rules. Being as clever as possible. Now and then, somebody would sign off. A Group on its way out. Clearing the noise.

I pulled out the earpiece. Let the cats have the rest of the salt-broth in my bowl of ramen. We sometimes added cayenne, just for something different. Not this time. We weren’t wasting spices now.

Nothing outside the windows when I looked. The same.

The thing about that book, about
Mythology
, is that, in the backs of our suburban, middle-class, Southern Baptist minds, thinking of dumb, classical ancients and their miraculously ingenious architecture, this was just as good—a different Bible. It was from a time when people didn’t tell sex jokes, or raise taxes, or know what stars were. We thought. They were stripped-down humans, primordial savants making brilliant things, waiting to collect the higher intelligence that we all had now.

It was a different Bible. They didn’t use grape juice in tiny, plastic cups once a month during the Lord’s Supper. They didn’t have a Lottie Moon Christmas Offering. They had wine, and satyrs, and a place with answers. At Delphi, the oracle talked back.

That was the thing.

•   •   •

Everything was still in order in the 1890s living room. We’d stripped most of the kitchen, the study, the bedroom. Piled what we could of the plank flooring, stacked the loose bricks from the chimney. Round-edged, pink things that were stamped
TEXAS
. Like the ones in the lot behind the Strip. The ones to be repurposed. The lamented, vigiled bricks.

There was moonlight coming through the windows. Bubbled and creased, like looking through Coke bottles. The Virginia creeper outside the kitchen had grown even farther inside. It obscured the window almost entirely. In places, it had come up through the domino tile. Which we hadn’t bothered with. We didn’t see much use for tile.

The 1890s half of the house smelled like varnish and tobacco. It had that rich, old huff. Our half smelled like stale glue—and cigarettes, now. The landlord had been saying for two years that he would renovate this half. Rent it out. We didn’t want anyone else walking across the foundation, which we would feel on our side.

I turned around when Ruth stepped into the kitchen, an abyss of dark, unfloored pier-and-beam foundation between us.

Had the entrance to Hades been shored up like this? Planked and reinforced? I couldn’t remember. What did Orpheus think, walking into the dark? The smoke?

She looked around at the piles. “This is all yours?”

“Ours,” I said.

She wrinkled her nose. “Why does it smell like pumpkin?” She was standing next to the window, which looked out over the dark side of the house, where the creepers grew. Where Adam and I had practiced.

I shrugged. “Probably mown grass or something. From earlier.”

She tugged at the hem of her baby T-shirt, scrutinizing the place. I thought she looked a bit
hard
for that type of shirt. It was black, at least.

“Why do you have fertilizer?”

She edged around the hole in the floor, toward the creeper.

“Are you …
we
going to blow something up?”

I reached out. Gave her a hand around the hole. I didn’t want her stepping on the joists. I wasn’t sure they were still good.

I looked at the fertilizer. Our Place, where we were going, had already been tilled, used. Fallowed and reused. The fertilizer was for the garden there.

“If we need to.”

She stood next to me, looking back at the hollow floor. “How’d you get the fertilizer? Did you buy it?”

“We got it.”

“You won’t tell me?”