“Sometimes you pick the wrong one,” Levi said, scooting away from the TV so we could see it better, “go higher instead of lower.”
“How do you know? If you missed it?”
“Transcripts of the ’cast show up around town.”
Static popped through the broadcast, jammers trying in vain to crack the ’cast. Always. But no one ever outgunned Chance’s local ’casters and their overclocked amps. We guessed that Chance’s agents chose his people by measuring their equipment.
“Everything began with the first man,” a girl’s voice said.
“Around town? I don’t fucking—”
“Mary, shut up a second.”
“Hasn’t used White in a while,” Levi whispered.
“We shall name him ‘Last.’”
“Fat Chance is a girl?” Mary asked. Quietly.
“No, Mary.”
“Last began with dirt and a plywood shanty, both of which he found.”
“We think ‘Fat Chance’ is a Place—a Group, actually.”
“He made everything from nothing else.”
“We’re not sure if it’s actually in New York.”
Levi was taking notes. Some of the best lines in the Book came from Chance. Sometimes codes, crib-sheet updates. Sometimes it was just gibberish, bullshit. Noise.
It had never been a story before.
“‘Nothing else’ included the circuit boards and cables from a disabled computer. It also included the tube and capacitors from a discarded monitor, a keyboard, a mouse without buttons, and an inkjet printer. From nothing else, everything began.”
White, we knew, after albino marijuana. New York White. Stories about it growing underground in the sewer when everyone flushed their seeds. Blind, and clean, and perfect in the stench. Most thought she was a metaphor for a first-place, a rally point, that Fat Chance had laid in, waiting for the Event. For the Collapse. Everybody’s first-place was based on what we’d cracked of her code. What we’d all cracked and stenciled and spread around town. Around the state. Country. Some said world.
White meant everything was going okay. According to Plan. A girl, a Place, a Plan. Some called her Snow White. The Cracker. The Bitch, The Whore, The Angel, The Score. The Ice Queen. The Wet Dream.
Adam and I called her “Hope” if we didn’t want anyone to know what we were saying. In case there were other Salvagers around, and we weren’t sure.
“Last began everything with the book in the shanty. It read, ‘This assumes many things.’”
“She sounds hot,” Mary said.
“This assumes many things.”
The audio popped and fizzed. The ’cast was over. Chance’s ’caster eased up on his amp and let the jammers collide, washing the waves with the pent-up shouts, catcalls, and codes that couldn’t get through White.
THE BOOK:
“TWO”
SEC. “I” SUBSEC. “B” (“GROUP”)
(cont’d)
[5] (i) Do not allow your Group to grow too large. (ii) Further, you must elect (or someone must assert) Leadership. (iii) This Leader is the final, authoritative voice during the crucial period before a Group Arrives at its Place. (iv) Post-Arrival, decentralize your Leadership—by force if necessary. (v) Would-be autocrats who resist decentralization are warned that they risk expulsion, rebellion, even banishment or death, for as the Narrative establishes itself, Leaders are primary targets for blame-placement. (vi) Because the early stages of establishing a Place involve many difficulties, losses, and discomforts, it is inevitable that blame will require placing. (vii) Leaders are warned that they will likely carry this blame, and as the majority of Places will Fail, most Leaders will lose either their lives or, at the very least, their chances for survival.
I.C.
“EVENT EXIT STRATEGY”
[1] (i) Your Event Exit Strategy is the sequence of maneuvers that will Evacuate your Group to its Place.
[2] (i) That only some will execute an Event Exit Strategy is to your benefit—those who do not will generate the disorder from which you can Forage a number of useful supplies. (ii) Your first inclination, post-Event, will be to assemble your Group and Evacuate. (iii) Disregard your inclination.
[3] (i) Your Event Exit Strategy begins with the convention of the Group in a first-place. (ii) The first-place is meaningless—it is a location only. (iii) You and your Group should take pains not to become attached to the first-place, as it may weaken the Event Exit Strategy.
[4] (i) If you are a lone Member who must travel to join your Group, proceed immediately to your Place or nearest rendezvous point. (ii) The First Phase of the Event Exit Strategy involves unacceptable risk to lone Members. As such, this phase is restricted to a Group-sanctioned excursion Party.
CHAPTER FIVE
why before the Lull?” Mary asked again.
Levi finally lit the cigarette. With the upper half of his face still polish-dark from the First Phase, and the black-and-white gleaming in hot, phosphor contours along his profile, he looked like Levi. This was a new person, a smoking person. We’d beaten the shit out of Adam and left him ducking in the parking lot, watching for cops.
“The Lull is a contradiction,” I said. “We have to get the jump.”
Mary was refolding her headkerchief in her lap. “What does it contradict?”
Levi muted the black-and-white. “Those who think to get out are going to wait until things get quiet. ’Til people start running out of steam.”
“Everybody’s high now,” I said. “Smashing and speeding and what the fuck else.”
“Eventually, they’ll get tired,” Levi said, “and the misinformed will make a break for it.”
Mary looked up. “So—”
“Think about it,” I said. “Everything’s quiet, suddenly you’re the only one racing out of town.”
“Bad idea,” Levi said. “You become game, prey. Something to chase.”
“Or,” I said, “you think you’re getting the jump, but you just end up in a mob of evacuees. Everything starts over, but this time you’re fucked—stuck in your car on some road across town.”
“But leave before the Lull,” Levi said, “and sure there’ll still be Outsiders gunning around, but the odds are on your side.”
“Sickest numbers game ever,” Mary said.
Or the best.
“How can we tell when it’s before the Lull?”
We.
“It’ll be a narrow window,” Levi said. “We think there’ll be a sudden rise in civil activity: sirens, emergency lights—that sort of thing. But it’ll be a false dawn. By that point, most Groups in town will have mobilized. The civvies will just get in everyone’s way, so they’ll be removed.”
“But you guys are Salvagers, too, right? I mean—”
“Mary,” I said, “beyond this room, there are only Outsiders. Predators, enemies. Targets. But it’s a two-way lens.”
… Trust no one….
Mary’s phone rang. We tensed, watching as she pulled it from her pocket and set it against her jaw. She looked at us, hesitant, guilty-looking. I got up to monitor Broadway.
“Hello.”
Smoke was rising from the square.
“What?”
Someone was upset on the other end of Mary’s connection. I could hear garbled panic-speech.
“What?”
Somebody must’ve Placed the courthouse. With enough Members, it could be impenetrable. But no land.
“Wait—”
Which meant everything they needed would have to be Foraged. In an urban center. Eventually, it would become a death camp. And there was the matter of all these churches, if you stuck around in town. They’d find you. Prearranged mobs. Armed and hungry and divinely ordained.
“No, Ruthie, just wait,” Mary said. “They won’t come in.”
She had been staring at the ceiling, at the fishing net, staring phone-call distances at nothing. I turned around.
Now she looked at me.
“
Just stay there,” she said into the phone.
I talked like she wasn’t there. Like Mary wasn’t standing there.
“Is this a bad idea?”
Levi looked at Mary. This is how things worked. A decision was external, every time. Someone else’s doing. Beyond Group-thinking, even. This was Place-thinking.
“I don’t care if it’s a bad idea,” Mary said, moving back and forth from the window to us.
We ignored her, facing off. Generating thought. I had my sword in my hand, the .38 in my pocket.
“You’ll have to Forage the place quickly,” he said.
“What?” Mary tried to get between us.
I grabbed her shoulder, jammed her into the stance. Made her stand and stare. We were three, now. “Stop thinking,” I said to her.
She swallowed.
“Does she have special needs?”
“Like what?”
“Medical.”
“No. I don’t … no.”
“Dietary?”
Mary shook her head. She looked down.
“Look, Mary. You have to look. Later, you can look away.”
She lifted her chin. We were scared. We were standing stiff. Centripetally locked. Now, with someone on each side, there was nowhere else to look. Before, Adam and I had looked away.… Look twice…. Before we knew how important the look would be. Now we were geometric.… Move once…. Trigonometric. Algorithmic. The science of sharing burdens.
“If you’re going to help her,” Levi said, “you have to help Hiram. Do everything you’re told. Make her do everything she’s told.”
“Okay.”
“Do not correct the operation.”
Her eyes were like Adam’s, back outside the grocery store, drawing in what would flow downstream. Into our own Charybdis. Into the coffer in the mud at the back of the field.
Mary put on her jacket. Zipped it up. She capped her head with the kerchief. When Levi finished repainting my face, he handed the tin of polish to me, to use on Mary.
She stopped my hand. “Do you have white?”
Levi headed for the laundry room.
“I will be white.”
I went to get a different shirt. For her mask. Mary stood, lit by the black-and-white on one side, by the digital on the other. Standing. We hadn’t told her to move yet.
• • •
We couldn’t risk the truck—we would need it later. Mary’s had four doors, which meant two extra risks, so we’d use mine.
Levi corked the last cocktail and handed it to Mary. She had four cradled in her arms. Rag-tongued wine bottles filled with oil and gasoline. We couldn’t smell the fumes through our masks. We checked the walkie-talkies, which we’d bought, legitimately, from the Army/Navy Store next to Meyer’s. Months ago. We would switch channels, up to the next prime number. Up to the top, then back again. Only on cue and cue-back. The radios were for the Evacuation. We hadn’t planned other operations pre-Evac. I had a crib sheet in my pocket.
Mary adjusted her burden.
“Everyone between us and Ruth is our enemy.”
Gunning the engine is a daydream. It is sunroofs, waxed paint, and artificial slick on the wheels. It is a better sound system, with deeper bass than the tinny stock setup you have now. It is a girl in the next seat, wearing a cross expression. For now, she is freebasing on your adrenaline, on the nothing will happen that counterbalances her better sense. Later, you will be the boyfriend who is stupid and troglodytic, with an affinity for the accelerator she doesn’t understand. A boyfriend who is too easily jealous, who gets angry for idiotic reasons. A pulp thriller she can read to her friends, who will share the mythic disdain. But for now, you’re her ticket out, out, out because who the fuck understands anything anyway? Who the fuck knows the zeitgeist but her?
• • •
… Do not render aid to Outsiders….
Gunning the engine is rendering aid to Outsiders. Because you go your own way carefully. It’s the Outsiders, with the exotic needs, whose ways must go in fire and exhaust, in peripheral stare-downs with too-close drivers in other cars. Nerves of steel and cool. To be the one who can do the thing.
… Remain in your vehicle as long as possible….
It is a synaptic equation, going fast. It’s the press, the delay, the calculated explosions under the hood. Even alone, driving to the same somewhere as always, gunning is always what it could be. The rehearsal, the performance. A mastery of escapes, races, demolition. The stories in your head.… The journey is only a synaptic ribbon…. Of being the guy with the fast car. The music and the bloodstream. The stories you can never finish before you think another thought. Before another thought thinks you…. Only the journey to reach it is real….
Gunning the engine is every drive home always. The revision. The all-at-once, the compaction of instants into that same. Slow. Press. All instants at once. How you dropped her off. How you got it there in thirty minutes or less.
It was fifty miles per hour down Mulberry Street. The wormhole-speed compacting time so that Mary and I were only out on the roads as long as we had to be. It was her being quiet, not correcting the operation. It was the mob loitering ahead in the road, near the commuter lot, where a sigil and WHIS.PER’s Rule were—something Solomonic, painted onto a dumpster in the shadow of a pecan tree. If the mob disabled the tires, Mary and I would be alone and insufficient.
My pulse makes sound the same way woofer cones do. Disturbing the air. Disturbing the better sense in my bloodstream, the brainless coup of pocketed blood in ready organs. In muscles that do things all the time without me. In strategic pumps and stutters. Not sound, but force. Noise.
… Take no chances…., says one of my brains.
Gunning the engine is … do not hesitate to use your vehicle as a weapon…. It is the sports car I drove to my senior prom, the tackle boxes filled with miniature lead warriors, the trips to Adam’s to game all weekend. It is Dungeons & Dragons on a Friday night, playing characters of both sexes, to be sure we got the story right.
It is the history I’ve created for Jo: her first date with a boy named Leslie—an idea that had promise: switching the names around, coming at the confusion from a different direction. It is a forced smile at the hand on her thigh. An accelerator-mindtrip out of the past, out of his car. It is what I think it was like, being Jo, being gay.
It is a day trip to Slade, before Adam and I graduated. It is the long, long trips out west, where I went instead to follow Her. I left Adam in Slade. I watched tumbleweeds and contrails and come-and-go dust devils in the red, red dirt.
It was the loitering mob, a many-legged thing without a brain, with only one long, spinal nerve. The sense of being from ass to forehead.
It was the will of our Place, drawing us across 327 Texas miles.
“Now,” I said to Mary.
She lit the rag in one of her bottles and rolled down the window. My ears followed the breeze, sucked of their pressure by the force of the wind. Mary touched the burning rag to another and undid her seat belt.
“One per side.”
She knelt on the seat, and I jammed my fingers beneath her waistband, grabbing a fistful of fatigues and underwear to keep her steady. She stood up completely, out the window, swayed by the wind, and my arm thrummed.
I was not thinking. I was White Mary’s tensed ass as she gave her guttering bottles to the loitering mob. The shambling thing underfoot.
I was the splintered fence-board in my fists at the fort. I had been dipped in a coffee can full of gasoline, and I was a flaming torch in a swordfight with Chuck—
Mary fell into the seat when I jerked her back in.
—Jon made the mistake of emptying the can onto Chuck’s last flame. A recharge. A suddenly thrown thing disking gasoline fire onto the dead leaves around us.
I did not follow Jon when he ran to the culvert. I stood with Chuck and looked for the first time on a wall of fire.
Gunning the engine was Dopplered screaming as we compacted a
nd vanished down the road through campus. They hadn’t laid spikes. But if they had, at least they couldn’t mob the car anymore.
I picked up some speed before we rounded the turn to Ruth’s apartment. At the corner, I slipped the car out of gear and cut the lights. I had the .38 in my lap. Mary had a bottle in one hand, a lighter in the other.
This street was darkness, deep in Cement City, the low-income underworld where college students took advantage of rent-controlled housing. Ruth lived in the Zodiac Arms. In a building called Taurus. It looked as if the grid had already died here. No one on foot, no one else driving. We were being cased.
Mary directed me to the building. I drove right up onto the lawn, right outside Ruth’s door. We weren’t taking any fucking chances.
I turned the car around, pointed it back at the parking lot. Mary waited for me to get out and lock the door. She followed me, bottles tucked under her arm. We planted our backs against Ruth’s door.
“Try calling first,” I told her. “It’s quieter.”
Mary turned, ducking, as if even I needed to be kept from the conversation. I watched the other apartments, looking for that dark-on-dark blink, the giveaway that someone was looking back.
“Okay, we’re here,” Mary whispered.
I could hear Ruth’s digital murmur in Mary’s earpiece.
“No, it’s just us.”
“Okay.”
Mary turned and looked at me. Her eyes were blue, like Levi’s, simple and staring. As blue here as they’d been between her roadside fires on Mulberry Street.
Mary, Mary, quite contrary.
“She’s coming,” she said.
I nodded. “Pull the mask off your face, so she can see you.”
She tugged it free.
“Look at me.”
She looked.
“What you did was right.”
Ruth’s apartment was a studio. The popcorned ceiling was peeling free. The baseboards were misaligned, that mystery rental-unit grime scummed into their cracks. Formica. Dark fluorescent bulbs. A futon and a papasan chair. She and Mary were whispering hurriedly in the bed nook, assembling Ruth’s pack.
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