There were textbooks everywhere with yellow stickers on the spines that read USED SAVES. Easels. Soldering irons and rivet punchers and a small jeweler’s torch.
I checked again through the window and slipped toward the nook.
“You work with metals?” I asked.
They stopped and looked.
“Yeah,” Ruth said. “I’m in sculpture.”
She was thicker than Mary. Long hair with untrimmed taillike ends. She wore a labret. Her left arm had been fully sleeved with tattoos.
I looked at Mary. “Two packs. One for her, one for her metals gear.”
Mary nodded and went back to stuffing underwear into a messenger bag.
I looked at a Monet print over Ruth’s bed. The only flowers in this cement underworld.
“Hey,” she said. “Thanks.”
“Hurry.”
THE BOOK:
“TWO”
SEC. “I,” SUBSEC. “C”
(“EVENT EXIT STRATEGY”)
(cont’d)
[5] (i) If your Group is sufficiently large that Cells of three or more members share urban centers, then each Cell should independently execute the First Phase of your Event Exit Strategy prior to Evacuation. (ii) Otherwise, only one Cell should attempt the First Phase.
[6] (i) Do not ignore signs of the impending Event. (ii) It is far better to gather in the first-place, preparing for the Event, and find yourselves mistaken than not to gather at all. (iii) Should you find that you are not with your Cell or Group when the Event occurs, collect yourself and any others for whom you are responsible and proceed immediately. (iv) Arm yourself before you make your way to the first-place. (v) Once you begin the journey to the first-place, do not stop. (vi) Do not render aid to Outsiders. (vii) Do not gather supplies, no matter how available they appear. (viii) Do not be alarmed by civil disorder. (ix) Do not be alarmed by violence. (x) Alter your route to avoid areas of obvious risk. (xi) Remain in your vehicle as long as possible. (xii) If Old Trade has completely Collapsed by this point, do not hesitate to use your vehicle as a weapon. (xiii) In the event of complete Collapse, law enforcement and military personnel are likely not to be the social allies they once were. (xiv) Regard them and their instructions with trepidation.
[7] (i) The first-place is your priority. (ii) It is your identity. (iii) “You” do not exist. (iv) You are an extension of its consciousness. (v) Only the journey to reach it is real. (vi) The journey is only a synaptic ribbon. (vii) All roads lead to the first-place. (viii) Do not panic.
[8] (i) If you must reach the first-place on foot, pay constant attention to your surroundings. (ii) Avoid open areas. (iii) Do not let Outsiders come within reach. (iv) Run, if you must. (v) Use violence if you must. (vi) Do not let weapons fire discourage you. (vii) Do not run in straight lines.
[9] (i) Avoid public transportation unless you are capable of seizing and operating the vehicle. (ii) Under these circumstances, remove or incapacitate other occupants. (iii) Do not take Outsiders to the first-place.
CHAPTER SIX
house of Cards, this is Party. Do you copy?”
“Who the fuck is this?”
“Party, this is HOC. Go ahead.”
“Target is in custody.”
“Spook? Are those ours?”
“What fucking target?”
“Channel cue.”
“Cue-back.”
I jumped channels.
“HOC, this is Party. Do you copy?”
“Copy, Party. Go ahead.”
“Coming home.”
“Copy. Code check.”
I pinged Levi with a flurry of dots and dashes. “S E C U R E,” so he knew. So he knew we weren’t under duress.
“Copy. Did you encounter resistance?”
“Affirmative. We neutralized a mob at WHIS.PER’s Rule and Mulberry Street.”
“Did you take casualties?”
“Negative.”
“Copy. Look twice. Over.”
“Copy, HOC. Over.”
I started a different route back. We couldn’t take chances with the Mulberry mob. Likely, they’d be lying in wait now. More road spikes—real ones. Some guns. Something bad.
Those that hadn’t burned.
I could see Ruth looking at my sword in the backseat. I hadn’t cleaned the blood from it yet. The edge had taken a severe curve when it hit that girl’s shins.
I could see, in my rearview mirror, that she had spacers in her earlobes.
Mary was holding the gun, staring through her window. In the glow of the dashboard instrumentation, she looked spectral. A ghost-face hovering, something you could see only in reflection. Like in the dark, if you said Bloody Mary Bloody Mary Bloody Mary into the mirror. Late at night, or in the afternoon with towels shoved under the doors.
You had to say it alone. You had to stand alone with the dark and the mirror, knowing that what you couldn’t see was you not seeing. You saw yourself not seeing yourself, seeing Bloody Mary, a ghost in the darkness.
But you never did it alone. You cheated, took a friend, took Jon, since it was his house, the corridor bathroom between his room and his little sister’s. You saw Jon not-seeing, which was better than not-watching yourself.
Mary stared through her reflection, not seeing Ruth in the dark seat behind her, staring at the blood.
Maybe Mary never knew about the Bloody. She was just Mary, seeing things in the dark.
I braked. Hard. Our collective guts clinched. Gunning the engine was everything in the right direction. Braking was never good.
There was something new on the Wailing Wall.
I pulled alongside the cracked parking lot and cut the lights.
“Keep a watch,” I told Mary.
She rolled down her window.
“What’s wrong?” Ruth asked.
Mary waved a hand, eyes on the dark. “Hush, Ruthie.”
Mary had a little lamb.
I picked up the walkie-talkie, turned it down, since Mary’s window was open.
“HOC, this is Party. Do you copy?”
“This is HOC. Go ahead.”
We had a quiet channel.
“I’ve got some new material on the Wailing Wall. We’re going to have a look.”
“Any activity on your perimeter?”
I looked at Mary. She shook her head.
“None so far. We’ll be on watch.”
“Copy. Be quick.”
“Get a pen. I’m going to read it to you.”
“Stand by.”
I looked out my window. Without the instrumentation glaring against the glass, I could see pretty clearly. Earthmovers and excavators and piles of concrete lay arranged at right angles. Sundered rebar clawed at the air. The developer hadn’t broken up The Noodle House’s old foundation yet, though the building itself had been cleared a month ago.
I turned and looked sideways at Ruth, speaking through my mask. “Hand me the binocs.”
“What?”
“Binoculars. Give them to me.”
She did.
“Party, this is HOC. Go ahead.”
I could see through the gaps in the old block, see the mid-century buildings on the other side of University Strip. The coffeehouses and bookstores and the bank that had been spared demolition and gentrification by a zoning debate. Most were closed. No doubt Big Red, the tavern around the corner, would still be open. One-dollar wells, two-dollar domestic drafts. “You call it” special—half off for the end of the world. Ladies get in free.
But we were out of sight, and the Strip’s parking lot had been gnawed to shards last week. Amid protest. There had been a candlelight vigil for the 1920s-era brickwork nested in haphazard patches throughout the asphalt. Like continents. Those that made it right up to the end of things.
The bricks would be repurposed downtown. Twenty dollars to donate one with your inscription to the city.
The burned-out shell of Marco’s was ahead to our right. Students had chained themselves and made short
films and ultimately burned the place down. In protest. Taking their bar before it could be stolen by the developers. Salvagers had quickly cleared out what paneling and tables had survived the fire. Marco’s was a grimoire of codes and stencils, carved and markered everywhere inside. Some on top of others. A Salvage speakeasy. Adam and I had bought our first crib sheet at Marco’s.
It had one wall left, which would be the last to go before the faux-colonial prefab came in. Before gas lamps and fake stucco made ghost stories out of the old muggings and vandalism. The fights. Mainly, it would be last because it was a single condemned wall—thanks to the arson—and needed special civil architects before it could be brought down.
The Wall had once been a mural. Civilly funded graffiti art, when a crop of liberal city planners replaced the old conservative farming guard. Eventually, it became several murals. Then a paint-and-mortar notepad for taggers and Salvagers. We’d relied on it often, getting frequency shifts, ’cast schedules, and heads-ups. We were Masonic, gazing through layers of useless tags at an esoteric palimpsest, finding what we needed in pieces, looking through the Salvager’s camera obscura for perspective on the impending Collapse.
“It’s from Chisolm, HOC. A signing-off. Stencil and crib-speak.”
“Copy, Party. What’s the message?”
I translated the vowel-less script: “‘Northern Lights on the Nine. Follow the grid—’”
Something slammed into my door hard enough to pop my ears. I ducked and gunned the engine, the wheel already arced to turn us around. The wrong way down a one-way road. The right way now.… Motivated perception, in turn, delimits the construction of your world….
I realized, as our car tailed itself around, tires screaming—announcing itself through the gaps in the Strip, straight through to the shambling crowd outside Big Red—that there hadn’t been an explosion.
Breaker.
Whatever it was had been thrown, or launched somehow.
Breaker.
I flipped the headlights back on as I overcorrected. There was somebody in front of the car. We weren’t moving fast enough to do any real damage yet, but I pushed him off his footing—the baseball bat in his fists followed him down. By the time I slammed again on the brakes, we’d already passed him a body’s-length under the axles.
I remembered to depress the clutch. So the engine wouldn’t stall when the RPMs died. I tugged the sword past Ruth. I had to kick the door to get it open.
“Out, Mary,” I ordered.
Its fleece was white as snow.
She didn’t hesitate.
He was getting up. A Hipster. A Strip-rat in old jeans and an undershirt. He had Salvage cryptography markered all over his clothes. A chunk of concrete sat nearby, where I’d stopped the car originally.
When the demolition started, they’d had nowhere to go, the rats. The Strip was all places to them. Panhandling, playing music. Trading crib sheets for baggies and cigarettes.
“Party, do you copy?”
He wasn’t getting up. Just rolling into better, flatter positions on the asphalt. A living cipher, straight from the derelict heart of Slade Salvage. Trying to get his esoteric shit together.
I wanted his information.
“Give us your clothes,” I said.
“What?”
“Give us your fucking clothes.”
“Fuck you, man. Give me your fucking car. I need a ride.”
He was drunk.
“You can give us your clothes, or we can take them.”
“Party, do you copy?”
“I don’t, I don’t …”
I knelt to take hold of his foot. To remove the boots so I could get the pants. “If you don’t cooperate—”
He kicked at me, just enough to wobble me out of my stance.
“Neutralize this,” I told Mary.
She had already drawn the gun, was already, in her own mind, shooting him over and over and over. She was standing, breathing, a ghost with a gun in the darkness.
Bloody Mary, quite contrary.
He made a go of getting up.
“I need you to neutralize this.”
I could do it. But I needed her to do it. She needed to do it.
“Party, what’s your situation?”
“Jo! What are you doing?”
I stood, too, pacing him up. He stuck his hand in his pocket. He wasn’t even a sword’s-length away.
“Mary.”
Its fleece was white as snow.
“You did the right thing.”
“HOC, this is Party.”
“Go ahead, Party.”
“Saying again, last lines from the Wall.”
“Copy. Go ahead.”
“‘Follow the grid to the yellow-brick road.’”
He paused. Swearing out loud into the House of Cards, our house, for the both of us. Northern Lights were not good—neither was the yellow-brick road. Slade was on a timer now. Chisolm’s last go before getting out of town. Pitting the Salvage hive-mind against itself. Phantom Cell Structure. Against Slade itself.
Because once called out like that, by any one Salvager to all others, to really, really get things going, they would all play along. They’d waited so long—some preparing, some fomenting, each with eyes only for the Event. And what they’d be allowed to do, once the old rules were really gone. Chisolm was setting them after the municipal infrastructure—after the electrical substations. Salvagers would obey—each alone, and all together. The drone of their disconnected ideas too loud to realize they’re all one thought. The ghost in the Salvage machine.
That was the thing about Salvage—it knew something about everything, but it had no idea what it was doing.
“Copy. Is everything okay?”
“We’re coming back.”
“You did the right thing,” Levi said. Shutting the laundry room door behind me. I walked past him with Ruth’s packs.
Ruth stood in the kitchen behind Mary, looking at Levi. She hadn’t wanted to stay in the car—had wanted us to let her out, to let her go—but we ignored her. Drove her. Passing a pair of brawling gangs on State Street seemed to explain things to her well enough. She was quiet the rest of the way.
“I know,” Mary said.
I stepped up behind him. “Look, now, Mary. Look at us.”
She looked, her blue eyes black in the darkened kitchen.
“We needed you, and you came through.”
“Well, I needed you—”
“You don’t understand. ‘We’ includes you.”
We all stood there. Levi and I had only rehearsed this on each other. To make sure Members knew their acts of violence were necessary. Were appreciated. Were Group and Place and staying alive.
I cleared my throat. “Let’s get out of these paints. Take your mask off, Mary.”
We weren’t violent then. There is a difference between paint and not.
“You can have the first shower, Mary,” Levi said. “You earned it.”
“Don’t ask her about tonight,” I told Ruth. “Don’t bring it up when she’s not wearing paint. Don’t bring any of it up.”
I opened the fridge. “How about a beer?”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
I smiled, looking, I imagined, less like a guerrilla hero and more like a raccoon. She was our guest, Mary’s guest—I wanted to be cool. Wanted it to be cool. I knew how she felt.
“You can ask anything else.”
“Okay.”
She didn’t look like things were cool.
“You want an ashtray?
You smoke?”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
“Why do you call her Mary?”
I stacked the Strip-rat’s clothes by the door. Levi turned back to the black-and-white. The rat had been carrying a code in ink between his shoulder blades that we hadn’t encountered before: the code for the frequency of a magazine in Morse code—continuous broadcast. It must have been new. Levi found the frequency, and the ringing, arrhythmic Morse began chirpi
ng into the room. There was no video.
“Was it worth it?” Ruth asked from the couch.
“What?”
“Taking his clothes.”
Mary walked in, dabbing at her wet head with a SOUTH PADRE ISLAND beach towel.
“Yeah.”
“What news?” Mary asked. “Word on the Lull yet?”
Levi was transcribing the broadcast magazine on a stenographer’s pad. One of several we’d taken from the office at work.
“Not yet,” he said.
“What’d you get from the rat’s clothes?”
I looked at Ruth. “You’re going to need to make a decision.”
“Why ‘Northern Lights’?”
“Because when they burn, at night, it looks like the Northern Lights,” I said. “Lots of weird colors, not much sound.”
Ruth snorted. “Some secret code that is.”
Mary tucked her legs up under her. “Chisolm wants to burn all the substations at once? Kill all the electricity?”
“After they do the Nine, maybe.”
“Which one’s the Nine?”
“It’s on the east side of the square, near the municipal center.”
“It looks like an old brownstone house from the outside,” Levi said.
“I’ve never noticed it before,” Ruth said.
I smiled. “Exactly.”
“Substations are eyesores,” Levi said. “So the city planners disguise them to maintain property values. Make them look like houses, office blocks—that sort of thing.”
Against one wall, underneath the old display case my mother had used in her wedding shop, we had stacks of photocopied civil documents. Codes, edicts, census information. We’d paid almost a thousand dollars for it. Five hundred each, after financial aid had disbursed last spring. The new city planners were into beautification. Substations, brick walks, renovating the Strip. We had it all.
Levi pointed at the stack. “Read up if you want.”
“Why’s it called ‘the Nine’? Is that code?”
“No, it’s just substation number nine.”
I didn’t say that we’d thought it was code, too. At first. Before we bought the stack.
Ruth lit a cigarette. Mary did, too.
“Why will they start there?” Ruth asked.
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