Mission accomplished.
* * *
They are crude weapons, Beethoven’s symphonies. The Fifth and the “Ode to Joy,” the Choral Fantasy. There is too much raw, naked power in those compositions. It makes them crude, unwieldy weapons.
In the early days of the war, before mankind began to live out its self-imposed vow of silence, we would choose subtler, more potent killers. Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik was the personal favorite of musical assassins, making it the equivalent of a high-powered sniper rifle. Brahms’s waltzes were perfect for focused, surgical strikes. Need a fleet of powered blimps knocked out from the heavens? Berlioz was your weapon of choice. Want to destroy the population of an urban center with minimal damage rendered to the enemy installation? Gustav Mahler’s Titan worked better than nerve gas.
* * *
Quinn never looks at me when we make love. It’s his way of coping with the thought that his music has become a weapon of mass destruction, turning a pleasurable ritual into faceless exercise. I like to watch him as he pants and grits his teeth. I like to follow his eyes with my own and watch him squirm. He hates it, but doesn’t stop. Afterwards, when we’re both lying spent on the bed, he will tap his fingers against my chest, signing, I hate when you do it.
Somehow, this makes me feel good. The thought that I have taken my own self-pity out on someone who cares about me. I’ve never told him that, but he knows, so we just go through the motions—I dismiss him, he gets angry at me, we sign at each other and gesticulate until we are both sore—and then we make love again. And this time, it’s more rage than lust that drives us. When Quinn finally falls asleep, exhausted, that’s when I am truly calm.
Quinn is a staff sergeant in the Violinist Regiment. He’s older than me by six years. When we’re alone, he likes to whisper to me what it was like when he was a child and the next door neighbor would wake him up every morning practicing her violin. He says it sounded like a cat in heat clawing at the walls. She was the first in his apartment building to die, a victim of the initial broadcasts. Says she stumbled out of her apartment, spitting blood, her eyeballs bursting just as she collapsed. He was ten. Every time he performs in the Sydney Opera House, he thinks of her, the way her eyes ran like clear jelly down her cheeks.
After Quinn is sound asleep, I stay awake and just hum, thinking of the deadly waveforms on the screens during the attack. I translate the two-dimensional landscape into music in my head and try to imagine what it must have been like, back then. Quinn tells me it was noisy as hell. That if you were caught in the city in the middle of the day you couldn’t hear yourself think. Quinn signs to me that people used to be worried they were making so much noise that they were messing up the environment. Noise pollution, they called it. I can’t even begin to imagine what that must have been like.
I never speak with Quinn in the mornings. It’s our little agreement. We pair together, like everyone else, out of necessity rather than love. A need to hold on to something, I guess. Sometimes I like to watch him at breakfast, signing something funny to his buddies. They nod their heads and smile.
None of us are allowed to laugh in this place. Our cutlery is made of soft plastic, our plates and tables are ceramic, our floors are polished wood and the swiveling chairs are noiseless. There are decibel alarms all around us, set to go off anytime any of us makes a noise that’s past the thirty dB range. So we stuff our mouths and chew very slowly, listening to our own heartbeats, making sure we’re not feeling numb or short of breath. We make sure our breathing is regular and controlled and that we are not experiencing any sudden headaches. The papers tell us these are the warning signs of an infrasound broadcast. The last things we will feel before our hearts burst into our chests.
Darren from the Percussion Regiment sits across from me. He’s one of the Wagnerian specialists, an infantryman. Darren would sign us stories from his time spent in the field, how he had over a hundred confirmed kills to his name. He’d tell us how he killed thirty men from two kilometers away by striking his infrasound gong at the nick of time. We were in awe of him until Darren got himself leave on the day that Melbourne was attacked. People like to sign that he screamed as he saw his hometown flattened by something impossible to see, a steam hammer as big as the world. That’s what got him transferred here, to the Sydney Opera House.
Good morning, I sign to him, and Darren just nods, hands shaking as he tries to cut his breakfast, chewing noisily. When he finishes, he drops the ceramic plate and smashes it to pieces. The alarms go off noiselessly across the mess hall. The MPs clamp the muffler over his mouth and drag him away, same way they do every morning. Nobody bats an eyelid during the entire process.
That’s all Darren’s been good for lately.
* * *
We make fun of Darren, with his habitual little scene every morning and his fits of screaming like an animal. It makes us forget about Raj, who hung himself with his own bed sheets. It takes our minds away from Randy, who signed to Dean asking if he could borrow his razor for just two seconds and used it to cut his own throat right then and there. He bled out on the shower room floor.
Not one of us signed for help.
* * *
Quinn sometimes signs to me, slips his hand into mine between rounds in the sound testing ranges.
How to cope.
I just take his hand in mine, squeeze and smile. Quinn thinks it’s because I love him. He has never admitted this to me, but I can tell when we’re alone. There is no sign for love, so he draws a heart on my chest when he thinks I’m sleeping, when I am muttering the tune of The Blue Danube waltz, thinking about target heads popping at every pause. Other times, Quinn signs into my hand when he sits next to me during briefing.
Will you miss me?
And I sign back yes without looking away from the displays, where the general is gesticulating against the projector screen, panting like a sick dog. All the while I am tapping my fingers against my knee to the tune of Vivaldi’s “Spring,” thinking of organs failing to the rhythm of trilling violins. It’s not that I want to lie to Quinn. It’s that I don’t want to see him turn into another Darren, another terminally ignored basket case, a mess hall breakdown spectacle.
In the locker rooms, I like to tap the first notes to “In the Hall of the Mountain King” against the doors and listen in for anyone tapping back. We make tiny sounds with the other men, the rattling of the padded hinges enhanced ever so slightly by the acoustics of the shower stalls. In our little zones of silence, we translate tremors into harmless symphonies. We never find out each other’s names, but we share between us something more intimate than anything I could hope to share with Quinn. Harmless, bloodless music.
* * *
This week, we are at war with the United States, following a truce with Japan. China wiped the Netherlands off the map with a calculated blast of the opening notes of Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra, putting them ahead in the sonic arms race. Across Europe, a hundred city-states annihilated each other by accident when they deployed “Les Toreadors” from Bizet’s Carmen and Khatchaturian’s “Sabre Dance” against one another at the same time. In Africa, a bunch of scientists found a way to deploy sound at any point on Earth by using Kilimanjaro as an amplifier. Scottish acoustic anarchists severed their homeland from England with a prolonged broadcast of Scotland the Brave, using the Isle of Man as a makeshift speaker.
Outside, there is quiet chaos and uncertainty. Inside the Sydney Opera House, there is order.
We are lucky to be here, the general signs to us. When this is all over, and our country is safe again, it will be us, the proud sons of Australia that will be tasked with rebuilding this brave new world.
Perhaps the general thinks he will be there to see it. Maybe he thinks he will come out screaming, arms swinging, singing some half-remembered thing from his youth. Quinn seems to think that, too. He signs into my hand.
Peace soon. See?
I nod, even as I’m humming The Skater’s Waltz u
nder my breath, tapping my fingers against my knee, dragging the tips over my overalls.
Behind the general, the projection screen flickers and shudders, ever so slightly. There’s a minute, almost imperceptible tremor in the air. I don’t even begin to feel it until I realize that I’ve lost my train of thought. The general only notices after the row of men in front of me have shot up from their seats, signing to everyone like crazy.
Out! Attack! Out!
Behind and above us, the projector lens explodes into pieces. Too late, the decibel alarms go off. Darren is clambering over us, stepping on my knees so he can get away. Quinn checks his watch and sees that the glass has cracked. He turns to me, but his eyes are already red and bleeding as his hand holds fast to my own. On the stage, the general shoots up and starts convulsing, like a child pretending he’s being shot at with machine guns. When he finally falls to the floor, I know it’s his heart that’s blown up in his chest. Quinn is holding on to me even as he’s bleeding from the gums, choking on his own blood. His eyeballs pop as I realize the tune to which we are being bombarded:
Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”
I feel the music gathering around us, a thousand decibels that have ricocheted across satellites and rebounded through amplifier dishes. I think of a conductor on the other side of the world, waving his baton as he kills us. I try to imagine a man that’s like me, unthinking and uncaring, but can’t. Something inside my skull pops as I’m making my way to the exit, and I flop like a rag doll. Sound rolls down on us, breaking through the concrete and the bedrock, smashing the Sydney Opera House and reducing it to featureless rubble in two seconds flat.
“Freude, schöner Götterfunken,
Tochter aus Elysium,
Wir betreten feuertrunken,
Himmlische, dein Heiligtum!” the Heavens sing.
And the world falls silent, once again.
Konstantine Paradias
Musical Inspiration for “Killing Noise”
I grew up in a house of music. According to my mother’s recollection (and a very specific chill that I get down my spine) I was nursed to the tunes of the New German School and later weaned under the solemn baritones of Bach. When appendicitis came a-knockin’, I writhed on the floor to the trills of Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik, often referred to as “A Little Night Music.” Perhaps it was this incident that caused me to change my views on classical music: maybe there was something sinister that prowled among the populated pentagrams.
I was fifteen years old when I learned about the potential military applications of subsonic weapons. How an inaudible hum could cause your eyeballs to pop. How a carefully tuned whistle could make your heart go thump-thump-bop before you finally dropped dead to the floor. I imagined Brahm’s Hungarian Dance No. 5, cranked up to the giga-decibel range, coming down like a hammer in downtown Athens, pummeling the House of Parliament to dust. It was a clean overkill that left nothing behind but a rain of dead birds and a soft hiss, dispersing in the wind like fine perfume.
“Private Powley, you are a goddamned disgrace to your uniform.”
The private tried to hold his sergeant’s gaze, fully aware that if he looked away he’d be in for even more stick. Nonetheless, he looked down at his filthy boots. He was a grocer, not a soldier.
“Look at me when I’m fucking talking to you, Private,” bellowed Sergeant Stone, a man as hard, and cold, as his name suggested. “This is not a fucking holiday camp, and you are certainly not here to sell fucking carrots. The enemy is not going to ask you for a pound of bastard plums and a little chinwag about the bleeding weather, are they? They want a pound of your useless flesh, if anything. You are here for a single purpose. To kill those bastard zombies at the other side of this godforsaken hellhole. If you do not find the killer instinct to satisfy that purpose soon, I may as well kill you myself and find someone better suited to that uniform. Is that clear?”
Powley nodded.
“When I verbalise a question, Private, I expect a reply in kind, not an impersonation of a nodding fucking dog. Now, I said is that clear?”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
“Halle-fucking-lujah, it speaks,” Stone growled through clenched teeth. “I expect to see you locked, loaded and ready for action. Not taking a nap, and not sticking your nose in that pissing Bible of yours. There are no answers in there son. I’m your God now.”
With that, Stone turned on his heel and stormed off. At least as much as a man can storm anywhere in three inches of mud.
The rain fell in a light drizzle, and Carl Powley sank to the floor at roughly the same pace as the water falling from the sky. His backside sank into the mud, but he was already soaked, already filthy. They all were.
“Don’t pay no attention, mate,” said the man next to him. “He’s like that with all us new recruits.”
“Conscription and recruitment are a bit different to my mind,” Powley said.
“Well, we both screwed up there, didn’t we? If we’d enlisted, we’d have helmets, body armour, night vision, the works. Us conscripts get jack shit, eh? Anyway, you’re here now, and while you’re here you’re his. You can either let him make you a soldier and have a better chance of staying alive, or carry on as you are and in all likelihood be dead by the end of the month. Your call.”
Powley sighed. The man, a fellow private named Pierce, was right, but that didn’t make it any easier. He could put on a uniform and carry a rifle, but that didn’t make him a soldier. To do that he’d need to kill, something he worried he’d never be able to do.
“Do you know why he calls ‘em zombies?”
Pierce grinned. “Ironic innit?”
“What is?”
“That those who are still alive are known as zombies. It isn’t just the enemy he views that way, it’s all of us. We’re the living dead, mate. Once you end up here, you’re dead, or at least it’s simply a matter of time until you are. Look at us. This isn’t life. We’re filthy, dressed in little better than rags, desensitised to violence and primed to kill. Unthinking, uncaring, unfeeling zombies. Pretty apt in my eyes.”
“I don’t think I’m quite at that stage yet,” Powley said, before allowing himself half a smile. “When I was a kid, zombies were dead folks brought back to life by witch doctors and voodoo black magic. Never thought I’d end up one.”
“Me neither,” said Pierce, lighting a cigarette. Smoking was far more common now; who needed to worry about cancer when the average life expectancy in the trenches was six months. “I used to love them movies, though the ones where the zombies were a bit quicker were better. Y’know, them where they were regular people infected with some sort of virus, making ‘em into blood and brain craving crazies. Never found the shambling ones very scary when you could get away from ‘em walking at a brisk pace.”
Powley took the cigarette when it was offered. He’d never been a smoker, but the habit had soon taken hold. It was something to do as much as anything.
“What’s with the Bible anyway?” Pierce asked. “You religious?”
“Not really. The way I see it, we made God, not the other way ‘round. It was a gift when I left home, that’s all.”
“Suppose you might as well read it then. It ain’t like the entertainment is up to much ‘round ‘ere.”
Powley didn’t reply. One hand held his cigarette, the other rested on his pocket where the battered Bible sat against his thigh. He caught Pierce looking at the rifle propped against the trench wall next to him. He knew what he was thinking, that Stone would go berserk if he came back and Powley wasn’t holding his weapon, ready for action at any moment.
Pierce gave the slightest shake of his head “Just watch that bastard, yeah? Anyway, we’re back on duty in two hours. Best get some kip mate. If he catches you dozing off again he’ll really lay into you. The bugger's watched Full Metal Jacket too many times. Thinks he’s a bloody US Marine.”
* * *
Six hours later they were halfway through their shift. It was raining
harder, and the afternoon was packing its bags to make way for evening. An orange sun hung limp in the sky, its light struggling to shine through the haze that filled the heavens since the world had been turned to dust. Powley shifted to his right, stepping away from an encroaching puddle and the reflection he no longer recognised as his own. He’d lost weight, his face gaunt and lined. He’d always kept himself clean and tidy, but his uniform was now a soiled grey, the only splash of colour being the flag of their fallen nation on his breast pocket, directly beneath his badge of rank in a beaten army. A hunk of mud fell from the trench wall into the puddle, and the reflection was gone. Powley was glad; he didn’t like the look of the man that had been looking back at him.
His attention turned to the wasted no-man’s land in front of him. It was a pointless fight, but there wasn’t really anything else left to do. The world was pretty much fucked. Even if the enemy could be beaten back, and the small bit of civilisation which was left protected from them, they couldn’t fight the wind. As if summoned by the thought, a light breeze picked up, the kind which should have been pleasant on a summer afternoon. Instead, it was a breeze now laden with poison and radiation, a deadly delivery far more effective than any missile or bomb, albeit slower and uncontrollably indiscriminate. It would be dark soon, and the artillery barrage would start. Anything the enemy could throw at them to keep them awake and soften them up for the inevitable offensive that would wipe them all out. He hadn’t slept properly since he’d arrived here.
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