Noise (9 page)

“What does it matter? We bought some things, we stole others. Some we found.”

She walked through, trailing a hand over the bricks, over the packets of bamboo seeds on top of the fertilizer. When we first moved in, the landlord sawed down all the bamboo in the backyard because its stalks spread like weeds. Later, the stumps were hard enough to puncture the wheels on his Jeep when he came back to work on the cross-ties shoring up the parking-lot gravel. We ordered the seeds right after. We’d let them weed all around our Place, to keep wheeled things out. We could use the stalks to fence the gardens. Down deep enough to fuck the prairie dogs and gophers.

She stopped in front of the old bathroom, looking at the dark mirror on the back wall. I’d meant to take the mirror down. To take it with us.

“You read the
Book?
” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “I don’t want a new name.”

“You want to be Secondary,” I said.

“Yeah.”

I didn’t say anything. The tattoos on her arm were serpents. Dark mirror, dark hair, dark floor in the darkness. She was nothing like Mary. White Mary with a gun by the Strip.

“I can fix things. Make things.”

Bloody Mary
.

“Can you weld?”

Bloody Mary
.

“A little. Some. I can figure it out.”

Bloody Mary
.

“All right.” I managed a smile. “Until we get there, we’ll just call you ‘Four.’”

She folded her arms. In the
cold
way, not the
fuck off
way.

“It’s better. That we call you something else,” I said. “You need to leave what you see with a different name.”

“Yeah, I get it.”

“You’ll still follow orders.”

“Yeah.”

Orpheus couldn’t look back
.

I turned, looked back out the front window. I was done talking to her reflection.

“It says that a Place needs a name.”

He couldn’t look back, or he’d lose her
.

“It has a name.”

She was quiet for a minute.

In the underworld, nothing ever died. It couldn’t. Things lasted forever. Dark places sucked things in: medicines and sports cards from the grocery store, mud, the violence in the parking lot, and the dark outside the Zodiac Arms. The
what the fuck do we do next?
Dark places didn’t spit them back out. Nothing came back
from Charybdis. The just-a-mouth monster at the bottom of the whirlpool. An ongoing event as being.

Charybdis was a thing that carried meaning across miles and miles and miles. To the sailors in faraway places, through the waves that had the same potential, could be Charybdis anywhere. A Place anywhere.

Our Place was 327 miles away.

“What is it?” she asked.

The ancients even had flowers that lived forever. In the underworld. They thought of everything.

We had read another book.
Native Americans
, which I loved. The Zunis had the same, an immortal flower, continents away from the Greeks. The Zuni rain gods brought it back from the dark. From a different underworld. From different details.

“What is it, Hiram?” she asked.

I didn’t remember anything else about the Zunis. Which was fine. I had what I needed.

“It’s Amaranth.”

“Do you hear that?”

“Where’s it coming from?”

I listened. The sound carried easily up through the unfloored pier-and-beam.

“It’s from school.”

I got down on my knees, looked into the earthy dark, smelling dust.

“It’s the bell tower. It uses speakers. Recordings. Fake bells.”

I listened again. “Someone’s Placed the school.”

“What?”

Idiots.

Four pointed over my head, out the window. “Look.”

I got up and crept to the window. They were quieter than their own sounds. The sounds of engines and giant, humming tire treads on asphalt finally hit us. A pair of Humvees negotiated the automobile-bramble in the Sycamore intersection. One had a Browning .50-cal mounted on the top. A troop transport followed more sluggishly after.

I felt cold.

“Is that a Group?”

“No. Yes.”

Fuck.

“It’s the National Guard.”

“I thought—”

“Yeah.”

“TWO”

SEC. “I,” SUBSEC. “C,” PROCEDURE “I”

(“THE FIRST PHASE”)

(cont’d)

(v) They should take new names. (vi) They should carry upon them some Mark that identifies their alignment with the Party. (vii) Deliver this Mark in the presence of the rest of the Group, solemnly and with great respect. (viii) This cognitively ordains the Party to its task.

[4] (i) Further, Party Members (and Leaders specifically) should replace terms such as
murder, kill
, or
injure
with
neutralize, remove
, or
incapacitate
. (ii) The Leader should order early acts of violence, rather than leaving their analysis and execution to Party Members, which delivers the Leader from conscience-accountability with the knowledge that he or she did not personally harm a victim. (iii) The Party Member is delivered from such accountability with the knowledge that the voice of the Group directed his or her actions. (iv) The Group is everything. (v) The Party is simply an exploratory idea developing the Narrative. Party Members must be reminded of this often—they are not themselves when in Party.

[5] (i) Leaders and other Party Members must congratulate, thank, or otherwise affirm acts of violence committed by a Party Member in the interest of the operation. (ii) Party Members must be made to feel that their actions are appropriate to the Narrative. (iii) Party Members are encouraged to remember that those they must neutralize or incapacitate are Outsiders—direct opponents to Group survival. (iv) If
Outsiders’ survival interests interfere with the Group’s, then, morally, these Outsiders are natural enemies—they are predators.

[6] (i) When in Party, look twice, move once. (ii) The obvious strategy is for a Leader to move his or her Party directly into a facility to Forage supplies, counting on martial strength to carry the Party through any necessary violence. This is an unnecessary expenditure of energy, as well as an unnecessary risk. (iii) Party excursions are conservative operations. (iv) Remember that, while it is unseen and generally unknowable, personal energy is a Group’s greatest resource. It must be replenished with food, water, and rest, all of which will be in precious supply. (v) As such, squandering energy with unnecessary maneuvers or unnecessary risk is a crime of waste, committed against the Group.

s
hould I wake them up?” Four whispered.

“No.” I waved absently at the front wall, trying to set the black-and-white’s earpiece in place with my other hand. It was a leftover, a yellowed plastic thing that had come with the crystal radio kit my dad and I bought. We had built it together when I was twelve. The year I’d quit the Boy Scouts. It had been something we’d done together—he was one of the Assistant Scout Masters. They all were—one assistant for each Scout, fathers all, even if that made for a clumsy Administration. When I quit, he was commuting back and forth, from Dallas to Little Rock, because he’d lost his old job. Arkansas during the week, Texas on the weekends—when we did things like launch model rockets and build crystal radios. The Scouts had been ours, not mine, so I didn’t go because he couldn’t go. I went back when he did.

That was the first time we ceased to be a family.

The earpiece fit the black-and-white’s audio jack better than our other earphones.

“Just keep watch,” I told her.

The black-and-white’s dials were very small. Levi and I had to be careful with them because, over time, my dad had stripped many of the tiny, plastic teeth from the housing that cinched the dial onto the much-thinner tuning rod. We had to press and turn at the same time, or the dials would just spin.

My heartbeat was coming to a late realization about what Four and I had just seen. About what it meant. It started working itself up. I spun the dials a few times, ineffectually, forgetting to
Depress the clutch, or you’ll kill it
. I clenched my teeth to keep from cursing. Calmed down.

KHED was one of our favorite ’casts, even though he didn’t use video often. I didn’t want to hunt for anything new. As I turned the dial through the frequencies, I heard a lot of static. Several of the ’casts weren’t active anymore.

Salvage was thinning out.

I found KHED. It was a simple ’cast—just the digital newscasts, stripped out of their feed (video, too, this time) and re-’cast, analog, for Salvage. I wondered how many people, other than KHED, could even still see the original report. Without power. Who outside of Salvage would have any idea that things had escalated? To the point that KHED wasn’t fucking with the feed. To the point that no jammers were fucking with him not fucking with the feed.

I took my hands off the dials and grabbed the stenographer’s pad. Shoved the earpiece in deeper. I tried to be dutiful about this. The news anchor was trying to sound objective. The most important thing was keeping a clear perspective on the Collapse, though she didn’t call it that. They—digital, everyone else—didn’t have a name for it.

I took notes of images and feeds in case they showed up in somebody’s ’cast later. I didn’t know how much longer we’d be in Slade, but it would be better to know what Salvage was reusing, from where, just in case:

Our school was shown, briefly, in the unrest slideshow. Nothing was burning yet, and no one seemed to be firing, but there were Groups, or Parties (I couldn’t tell), on the campus, and they looked, in that brief moment, like they might be mobilizing. We’d already seen the fucking Humvees outside.

I knew what this was about. The churches in the cities—the mosques and temples, the tabernacles and worship centers, the ones with ribbons of fleeing refugees like licking tongues streaming from the double doors to the streets outside—those would be gang attacks. The ones in the urban centers. Attacked from each corner, from streets with saints’ names.

But those streets were no longer divine. Their builders had offered them up, sacrificed Any Other Name, to be sure their cities paid tribute to God’s favorites. Now the streets were just lines, marking ganglands. There was nothing special about these
churches. There were no secret histories or clandestine reliquaries. No one named pillars anymore, or stored sacred things in hollow places. Paid attention to divine blueprints, or built mysteries around their architects. These days, Solomon and David were an LLP—a firm downtown, perhaps, that had done civil buildings and art museums. One of the companies that designed churches, that also did movie theaters, schools, prisons. Because the schematics were the same, handed all the way down from the Second Temple: how to contain people according to God’s will.

Now they were just places to gather. Interchangeable. Forgettable. Flammable.

Any gang leader knew he had to get the jump if he was going to come out on top in all of this. Or stay on top. He had to carve out the new holy places. Thin them out. Place the holiest of holies somewhere in
his
territory.

The other churches, though—the empty ones, burning just the same—those would be Salvage attacks cutting out the risk before it could take root. Southern Salvage was terrified of churches. People would get scared, so they’d go to church. They’d eat church food, pray church prayers. Then they’d get hungry: a bunch of scared, well-armed southerners. In massive mobs. Not Groups. Who all believed they were right by God.

It wouldn’t take long, Chance had figured, before they’d start trying to spread the Good News at the ends of their rifles. Soon it would be God’s Will to survive, to be fruitful and multiply, and the Outsiders were threats. Nephilim. The Canaanites in the way. The mechanics of staying alive would rewrite the rules, and the South would be dotted with well-armed city-state theocracies. Military councils in Family Life Centers. Exercise on the old playgrounds. Procreation and Programming in the Nursery.

It would be a nightmare. I didn’t care much. With the National
Guard and the police firing at them, though, Salvage was going to care less and less about making sure to go after only empty buildings and disabling facilities, resources, or threats in benign, nonviolent ways.

I stopped. Chance had never been in New York.

I looked at the reporting bitch who gave the news.

It was a diversion, I realized. Up the seaboard, because the rest of Salvage had become
too
interested in the Chance. In its whereabouts, maybe. It was smart. They weren’t taking any chances.

I looked at the note.

Terrorist organization.

Religious.

Compound.

I listened. They killed them. Killed Fat Chance and Slim Chance, Slow Moses, the Jeté. White. All of them.