Noise

by Darin Bradley

  Levi was transcribing the Morse ’zine again. He wasn’t listening.

  “Center of town,” I said. “Once the Nine goes, it’ll be easy for Salvage to move to the closest others. They aren’t far—a couple miles apart each. Once they’ve killed Three, Four maybe, transformers will start blowing all over town.”

  “Which means fires,” Mary said.

  “Yep. They want to start downtown to get the municipal center to start drawing from its generators. The sooner those die …”

  “What’s the grid? The yellow-brick road?”

  “The grid is the grid, the electrical grid.”

  I heard a bit of the ’zine ’cast. It was a schedule. I wasn’t sure what for. I’d missed the first part. Levi was being very quiet.

  “And what’s with all this terrorist shit? I thought you conspiracy-heads were about surviving, not … revolting.”

  “They’re speeding up the process. Salvage isn’t supposed to be out to hurt anybody—it’s supposed to be a reaction to the Event—but the sooner it cuts the systems that most people rely on, the sooner the unprepared will start dying off.”

  The girls just looked at me. Some jammer got ahold of the frequency, started ’casting numbers into the code. It would take a while before we knew whether they were random or another code themselves.

  “The sooner they start dying, the easier it will be for the rest of us, the prepared, to survive.”

  “Three, ought,” the jamming-code said, crackling through the black-and-white’s tiny speaker. The ’casts were feeding back on one another, making theremin sounds between the dots and dashes and the numbers. The voice sounded like a robotic child’s.

  “That’s the theory, anyway.”

  “One.”

  The girls smoked. Mary looked pointedly at the ashtray, tapping her cigarette into it. She wasn’t looking at me. “What’s the yellow-brick road?”

  “Four.”

  Fluff stretched herself on the carpet. She blinked at me, her affronted green eyes staring, judging. Edmund—the other cat, the black one—looked, too, sitting beside Ruth.

  “One.”

  “It’s Broadway,” I said.

  “Fucking … Can’t this asshat jam something else?” Levi said.

  “Five.”

  “Wait, Broadway Avenue? Like, outside the front door?”

  “Yeah.”

  Ruth looked at the window. The blinds were drawn.

  “What happens on Broadway?”

  “Nine.”

  “It’s fucking pi,” Levi said. “Give me a break.”

  “Nine.”

  “Wait.”

  “Nine.”

  “What happens on Broadway Street?”

  “That isn’t pi.”

  “Nine.”

  “What was that schedule, Levi?”

  He looked at the window, too. “The fires.”

  “Nine.”

  We were quiet for a moment.

  “Shit, everybody to the back of the house. Pick up the goddamn cats.”

  THE BOOK:

  “TWO”

  SEC. “I,” SUBSEC. “C”

  (“EVENT EXIT STRATEGY”)

  (cont’d)

  [10] (i) When the Event occurs, monitor news programs in constant shifts. (ii) If such programs are unavailable, allow capable Members to perform reconnaissance in graduated distances from the first-place. (iii) Reconnaissance operatives should follow the same guidelines as Members approaching the first-place on foot. (iv) You are watching for clear signs of the Collapse of Old Trade. (v) It is likely that looting, violence, arson, and vandalism will either accompany or precede the Collapse. (vi) When it has become clear that civil unrest has outpaced local authorities, you will begin the First Phase of your Event Exit Strategy.

  [11] (i) As uncontrollable disorder becomes the new rule of law, law enforcement and military personnel will necessarily abandon their cohesion to tend to their own Groups and families. (ii) At this point, though your Group is now in considerable danger, you may Forage without fear of legal reprisal. (iii) Should you begin the First Phase while the rule of law still prevails, then your Group is Criminal. (iv) Contrary to popular anarchic thought, your new society is unlikely to develop order, and therefore operation, if it takes its infantile steps criminally. (v) The Plan is a reaction. (vi) It is not a catalyst; neither is it a revolution.

  I.C.I.

  “THE FIRST PHASE”

  [1] (i) The First Phase is the acquisition of supplies before the Evacuation. (ii) This acquisition necessitates at least three Members. (iii) Additional Members can strengthen the operation, but care must be taken not to expand an excursion Party beyond the tolerance of its central, task-based Leadership. (iv) It is primarily an exercise in vigilance.

  [2] (i) The excursion Party must only include Group Members who are capable of and willing to commit violence against others. (ii) Members who are willing yet incapable may assist as an Auxiliary Demolitions Party.

  [3] (i) Contrary to the Narratives of contemporary media, committing acts of severe, debilitating violence against others is monumentally difficult for all but a small percentage of society. (ii) As such, overcoming the aversion to violence is best effected through disguise. (iii) Party Members should adorn themselves with masks. (iv) They should wear clothing or armor that obscures their skin.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  calm down, Ruth,” Levi said. “You have to make a decision.”

  I glanced at the others in the circle. Each sat cross-legged on a different rug. Some of the rugs looked Middle Eastern, some Navajo. Mine was simply a giant rug-picture of a wolf. It had been provided.

  The others had their chins up and their eyes closed. Cassandra, the evening’s hostess, sat in the center, small votive offerings to each of the four corners around her. North, South, East, West—she appeased the compass before we all sat down to become spiritually lost.

  “You have to decide that the ‘you’ you know is mistaken. It is occluded, screened by the smokes and muds of our contemporary society.”

  I closed my eyes. I wanted this to work. Wanted to experience something. Spiritual.

  “Your totem animal is the better you. The wild and natural you. You must decide that it is a better ‘you’ than you are.”

  I didn’t know how these ceremonies went. I had just followed a flyer on the wall at The (D)rip, the coffeehouse on the Strip.

  PAGAN FELLOWSHIP, ALL WELCOME

  UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CENTER, 112 NORTH MAIN

  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.

  “Open Minds,” Beginner’s Zazen, all welcome,

  Thursday, 7:30 PM, Room 255, Auditorium Building

  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 Chu
ck 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.

  • • •