“I know furniture. But I’d like to know more.”
Frank tried to inspect the dry ravines in his brain, the places eroded by NK3, where he once might have easily found the answer to the riddle of the two crosses, but he was at the uncomfortable limits of his intuition. In the church of the empty cross, what would they have prayed for?
They went back to her room, got undressed, and made each other smile.
Redwings knocked at the door and announced himself. “Frank, sir, it’s Redwings.”
“I know your voice, Redwings.”
“Yes sir, and I need to notify you personally, sir, of the conditions surrounding the Playa.”
Frank let him in. “Shannon Squier is in The Woman’s head with Erin and the Stripers below and she’s going to sing and the word has gone around and everyone inside the Fence, and what is troubling and the reason I am interrupting your time here with Siouxsie Banshee is that from my reports when I say everyone I mean everyone, is on their way to the Playa by foot, art car, Segway, and bike. And she hasn’t made a sound yet but still, folks are making a circle around The Woman, just waiting for Shannon Squier to sing. And Erin did not check this first with Security or Chief. Those who were there at the Burn and saw Shannon dancing have been bragging about it to those who didn’t go, which was most everyone, and on the reputation of the excitement of that event, no one wants to miss Shannon’s return. I say partly that excitement was for the big plane that flew above our heads but I see their point. We can have an observation team on top of the Wilshire Towers condo looking over the Playa, but no crowd control. I got everyone in the Security team on Figueroa, getting ready to move the Drifters to the buses.”
“Redwings, you have the bike with the sidecar?”
“Yes sir.”
“My trusted friend, always ready. Siouxsie, I can use your help here if you go to the roof and watch the street. Redwings will set you up with communications.”
“I want to be with you.”
“You will be.”
“Thank you, Frank.”
“For needing your help?” He kissed her and left her.
Gunny Sea Ray, Hopper
Gunny Sea Ray called Frank to tell him he’d watched Hopper, in green hospital clothing, take a charged electric bicycle from the rack outside the hospital.
“Gunny, wherever this Kraft Serviss or Nole Hazard goes, stay close to him. If he goes to the Playa, stay near him. If he goes back to Center Camp, stay near him. Let the man go where he wants. He’s working with someone else, or being protected by someone else. Serviss-Hazard wants something from Chief, and it’s not Chief’s life. And see if anyone else is watching him, following him the way you’re following him. I think he has a partner. He might be eating Corn Nuts.”
Gunny Sea Ray followed on his Segway, forced to go slowly so that Hopper wouldn’t see him. The traffic was heavy toward the Playa and Gunny was certain Hazard didn’t know he was being followed. Gunny Sea Ray lost him on the road up to Center Camp but found him again, hiding in bushes with a view of Chief’s terrace. The green hospital clothes were not camouflage and his binoculars reflected light. Gunny called Redwings with his report.
“He’s watching Chief’s house with binoculars.”
“See a weapon?”
“No.”
“Then you don’t have to do anything now. Call right away if something changes, but otherwise, keep me posted every thirty. Frank and I are on the way to oversee the unfolding events on the Playa.”
Vayler
Vayler walked through the Drifter crowds lining up for their last meal and wondered about his basic mistake. He should have worked closely with Toby Tyler, he thought. She always wanted extra Drifters to do the heavy work, because she believed in the endless surplus. If she knew what Vayler kept hidden, she would have understood the need to leave most of the Drifters in the desert instead of sharing the food with them. It would have meant harder work for the First Wave, but the resources would have sufficed.
He stopped at a Korean truck for thin slices of gristled and fatty barbecued beef. The Drifters had never looked happier. A few of the regular Bottle Bangers stood naked pretending to be Shamblerettes, dancing badly to the bottle banging of their friends.
Everything was in place, waiting for word from Chief.
The Woman
The sun was low over the Fence.
Erin climbed to Shannon. “You have to start singing.”
“I will.”
“When?”
“Not yet.”
“You see the crowd. They’re waiting. Impatient.”
“No one has to stay.”
“Frank Sinatra and Redwings are here. They’re on top of that building, on the roof, watching us.”
Erin waved to them.
“They can’t see you.”
“Call the Lamplighter Guild.”
Soon, the Lamplighter Guild, in their double file procession, faces hidden in their heavy cowls, came from their encampment bearing torches. A shrouded Lamplighter lit the first fuel-soaked tiki torch and the Lamplighter to her right touched flame to the torch, and then the next Lamplighter followed in solemn ceremony, and then the next.
When a hundred torches were burning, Shannon tested her voice and sang one note, a low O, extending it without raising the pitch. Shannon was only introducing the song, expecting to signal for the music, but the crowd wasn’t returning the usual involuntary cheer sucked from them by theatrical habit. No one had heard a voice alone like this in four years. They didn’t know what to do. The crowd settled, everyone sat down.
Shannon, Helary, Erin
Redwings was telling Sinatra: “This is the biggest assembly we’ve had inside the Fence, Frank. In all the four years I don’t recall a crowd this big. I didn’t know there was this many of us.”
“What would that change if you did know there were so many of us?”
“Frank, sir, as I proposed the thought, I’m ashamed that I can’t comprehend an answer. You’re probing the limits of my understanding.”
Frank was about to say, “Good friend, your limits are limitless,” when Shannon’s voice reached them. The long O continued and Frank waited to hear the singer break the note to take a breath, but it continued, a sound that was clear and rough and human. He couldn’t speak.
Shannon was gone, the Playa was gone, Frank was with three other boys, on bicycles, on a path beside the ocean. He was in a desert war, he was in the Hollywood Bowl filled with people singing along to The Sound of Music.
Chief
Chief’s house. He couldn’t hear Shannon clearly, wasn’t sure if she was singing a song or making it up, but as he picked the music out of the night’s ambient background, he remembered a woman in a restaurant. They weren’t going to see each other again. She asked for a last kiss and he said he couldn’t. He didn’t think the woman was Pippi, but she might have been. Then a new memory: he was on a boat, there’s a shark following, and a man said, “We’re going to need a bigger boat.”
He remembered looking for the mayor, to kill him.
The Playa
Shannon was invisible to the crowd. From the Playa, there was no Shannon, there was only the miracle of The Woman, singing.
Shannon watched the crowd as she went from a loud and sustained high note to a note halfway down the scale, in the safe middle of her range, where she could hold the note gently and quietly, not recovering from the high note’s strain but distributing the high note’s power throughout her body and absorbing it into her blood. She looked down at Helary and Jobe. Their eyes were closed.
She didn’t know what she was doing. She was just singing because it felt amazing to let her voice go on without intention.
She sang: a long OOOOO.
Shannon looked at the crowd’s closed eyes as her reflection. She was the only real weapon inside the Fe
nce and for all she knew the only weapon in the world.
She sang it again: OOOOO.
When she had performed for the Drifters and Bottle Bangers in the street on Figueroa the night of the Burn—without her voice, with only her rhythm to provoke them—isolated feelings were all that she could release with the encouragement of her bottle banging. But the verified and rehabbed First and Second Wavers surrounding her on the Playa were getting more from her than just the beat.
Shannon saw that the crowd was not a series of concentric circles like the rings of a tree, but a coil, a single line starting at The Woman’s feet, wrapping around The Woman and The Man, spiraling away as newcomers took the next place, extending the serpent’s tail.
On the night of the Burn, the jet had broken the connection between Shannon and the Figueroa Drifters, but here on the Playa, in the open field ten miles from downtown, as she sang in her own voice for the First Wave, there was that feeling and then a series of pictures. No one knew that some of the pictures belonged to their old lives and some of them belonged to movies and television. They couldn’t make out the difference between the memory of crying at a fifth birthday party and crying over the act break in any one of all those episodes of television they’d watched. The sadness they could feel now might be about the loss of someone they loved in their real lives before NK3 or it might be the memory of a child dying in an episode of ER. They didn’t know the difference between their dead or drifting parents or baskets of puppies on YouTube.
Erin thought of one of the pictures in her bedroom, standing between her father and mother, with their arms around her shoulders. They were on a high point overlooking a lake, with pine trees everywhere. She remembered her father asking someone else to use his camera to take the picture. Just that: “Excuse me,” her father said. “Could you take our picture? You just have to push this button.”
Siouxsie Banshee, Vayler Monokeefe
On the roof of the Ritz-Carlton, Siouxsie Banshee heard Shannon’s voice and saw the Drifters moving. She called Frank.
“Something is happening. The Drifters are moving toward Wilshire. They’re dropping their food and leaving Figueroa and they’re on the way to the Fence. I’m coming with them. I’m coming to you.”
“If they try to open the Fence, they’ll be shot.”
“She’s calling everyone to join her, Frank. I can feel it. If it weren’t for you, I’d . . . I don’t know. I’m confused. Shamblers, Drifters, Driftettes, Verified and Unverified Second Wave. That’s what I see from the roof here, Frank. Bottle Bangers dressed as bleeding Driftettes, food-wagon chefs in gun-shop camouflage suits, and squadrons of Transport Service workers in high school cheerleader uniforms. They’re on their way, walking down Wilshire, all dressed up, everyone but me.”
“A soldier. I think that’s what I was. I made a mistake in not bringing you inside.”
“This is the end of the Fence, tonight.”
“Why? How?”
“Because all of civilization, every civilization, every country, collapses under the weight of its own stupidity when the conditions it ignored put on costumes and march in a parade that cannot be stopped.”
As the Drifters left the food trucks, as the people working in the trucks left them, too, as the Security detail left Figueroa for the march to the Fence, Vayler wanted to call Chief to say, “It’s not my fault.” But he knew he was wrong. This was all his fault. He tried to run ahead of the crowd, to stop them before they attacked the East Gate, because Chief would never forgive him if the grand buffet turned into fuel for a revolution.
“Turn back,” he tried to say, but he couldn’t hear his own voice anymore. As the crowd approached the Fence, Shannon sent the message to open the gate, and the Drifters, after four years of exclusion, poured through the Fence, and Vayler disappeared under their feet.
Chief, Go Bruins
Go Bruins asked Chief: “What’s Shannon singing? Is that a song? We should go to the Playa and hear it.”
“Not a good idea, Go Bruins. I can tell from what I hear she’s put something in the song, like a poison. We’re safe here, but only a little.”
“If it’s dangerous, you can stop it.”
“You think so?”
“You’re Chief.”
“That’s true. I was once the chief of police of Los Angeles. The last chief of police.”
“I did not know that.”
“I was one of the first ten people through rehab. The mayor, the chief of police, the head of the fire department, the head of medicine at County General Hospital, the head of the California National Guard. That was Toby Tyler, but her name was different. We were the first two to wake up. We made some choices. They weren’t all the smartest choices. The mayor ran away. I don’t know where he went or what happened to him. Perhaps he died.”
“A lot of people died.”
“And more will die, Go Bruins,” said Chief, pointing toward the crowds on the Playa. “Look at them.” He showed Go Bruins how to focus the strongest telescope. “Can you lead them, Go Bruins?”
“Me, Chief?”
“No one but you knows where to find Pippi, right?”
“Unless you change your mind, sir, no one else will know.”
“Then I charge you with this, Go Bruins. While I go to Pippi to bring her back, I want you to be the Chief. I know you can do that. You believe what I tell you, don’t you?”
“Always, Chief.”
“Then those people are yours to manage while I’m gone.” While Go Bruins searched for faces in the crowd—impossible at this distance—Chief went into the house, took one of the handguns from the closet in his bedroom, returned to the terrace, and shot Go Bruins in the side of the head, to keep bullet or blood from the telescope.
Hopper, Gunny Sea Ray
Was it a gunshot? Gunny Sea Ray had a better view of Hopper than of Chief’s house on the hill. Most of the big houses in Center Camp were made of stone and the single crack of the explosion bounced around the mansions. Frank Sinatra had taught his men not to expose themselves until they were certain of a gun’s placement. In the early days of their recovered consciousness the Security teams were not yet certain that attackers could come from any direction, and that snipers could hide from Inventory squads on the search for box stores that hadn’t been looted. But Gunny was sure that the gunshot came from Chief’s.
When Gunny saw the man he knew as Nole put his binoculars back in his bag and move through the brush toward Chief’s, he called Redwings, but Redwings didn’t answer.
Gunny thought about Frank, and what advice Frank would give, and then, what Frank would say to Gunny for making the wrong choice here. And Gunny’s idea of what would make Frank angry with him was simple. If Gunny Sea Ray knew that someone in Chief’s house had fired a gun while a stranger was breaking into the house, he needed help.
Chief
With Go Bruins dead, no one but Chief knew where to find Pippi. So that was it. After sending so many Drifters on their final bus rides to the desert—to keep as much death as possible away from the city—now there was a murder in Center Camp.
All he had left in the world was Pippi, and he wanted to be with her. Yes, she resented him or hated him, but he would go to her now, while everyone was away and no one needed him or wanted him. “This is how things collapse,” he said to Go Bruins’s body. “This is what it means to be human now. It used to mean something else. Or maybe that’s vanity. Maybe it was always this way. I don’t know. Things feel wrong. I pretended they felt right, but that was all it was. I encouraged myself to believe in my plan and I had enough of the aura of confidence to convince others that their self-doubts were true, and that anyone who trusted himself over me was doomed. So long as they didn’t know that things were ever different, they didn’t have a cause to panic. They left that to me. I wasted my time with the dual project of Burn and preserve. Burn to prote
ct the community of the Fence, and preserve what had value and would again. Rather than? We learned how to plant food. That was all we needed to know. There are things we overcomplicate, Go Bruins. No, not we, me. Blame it on me. There are things I overcomplicated. The Founders? We were the Founders.”
Hidden behind the terrace wall, Hopper listened to Chief talking to the body. Gunny Sea Ray couldn’t hear Chief and wanted a better view of Hopper. Hidden from both of them, Gunny Sea Ray felt safe leaving the protection of the brush to move quietly up the sidewalk.
Born before the plague as Felipe Louma and after the plague reborn as Gunny Sea Ray, he was about to die again, but in this edition of his life, there would be no sequel. There was a man behind him with a knife and a gun. There was nothing personal in Felipe/Gunny’s death, but the man with the knife and gun wanted to follow Hopper, since Hopper was on his way to Robin, to the woman he believed was his wife. To get closer to Hopper he’d have to be ahead of Gunny Sea Ray, and having come this far, what was one more death? He crept up on Gunny Sea Ray and slit his throat.
Siouxsie Banshee
Siouxsie saw that the gate constricted the long parade of costumed Drifters and that as her area of the line approached the threshold into the once forbidden city, the crowd around her thickened. The distant music tickled an associated image out of her brain: she was waiting in the line in a supermarket at Thanksgiving, waiting to pass through customs at the airport in Moscow, waiting in the lunch crowd line at In-N-Out Burger.
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