Homeland

by Doctorow, Cory

  But now the siren blared, and it was louder than I remembered, though I couldn’t see the nearest PA pole. It was so loud it felt like it was inside my head, so loud it made my teeth clench as it howled up and down its waveform, a sound that every cell in my body knew meant “Bad stuff is happening.”

  The silhouetted stalks of wheat began to waver more forcefully, colliding with one another as they tried to find some place away from that punishing sound.

  Suddenly, the sound cut off, leaving behind a ringing silence that was almost as scary. Then, an echoing, giant voice broke out over the PA system. It was the voice of pure authority, like something engineered in a lab or coming off a text-to-speech library designed for maximum intimidation and terror.

  “THIS IS AN UNLAWFUL GATHERING.”

  The words bounced around the precincts of the protests, blocks and blocks of it, like a tasteless parody of the People’s Mic.

  “YOU ARE SUBJECT TO SEARCH AND BACKGROUND CHECKS.”

  I thought of the copter zipping over our heads, streaming all this live to the Web. I wondered how many people were tuned in.

  “THOSE WHO COOPERATE AND WHO HAVE NOT BROKEN LAWS WILL NOT BE ARRESTED.”

  There was pushing and shoving from nearby. I looked around and saw that one of the pools of light belonged to a husky protester with a headlamp. He was taking off his baggy coat, revealing a windbreaker emblazoned front and back with block-cap letters: SFPD. I looked around from side to side and back and front and saw that there were more SFPD windbreakers coming into view as burly guys dotted around the crowd like raisins in rice pudding revealed themselves.

  But they weren’t the only ones revealing their secret identities. A dozen yards away, a trio of guys in all-tactical black, wearing goggles and face masks, arranged in a flying wedge, forced their way through the crowd, knocking people aside as they bulled in a straight line. They snapped to a stop in front of a pair of young guys with scared-pale faces and eyes wide enough to show the whites. With no preamble or windup, two of the officers stuck them with Tasers, and they fell to the ground like stunned oxen, twitching and thrashing. One of them brushed a bystander with his hand and she screamed and her head whipped back and hit the nose of the man behind her, which began to gush blood.

  The three guys in the flying wedge took no notice. They knelt down and bound the two guys hand and foot with plastic cuffs, cinching the bindings tight with savage yanks, looking like they were trying to start balky gas mowers, then tossed the guys over their shoulders like rolled-up rugs and bulled their way back out of the crowd.

  It was around then that the screams and the pushing started.

  At first, it was a distant sound, sounding like it might be a block away, and the pushing was just rippling waves back and forth through the crowd, the person behind me taking a half step back to absorb the shock of the person who’d just taken a half step into her, banging into me, me taking a half step back and colliding with Ange, who steadied me and took a half step back.

  But the next wave was much stronger, not a half-step push, but a step and a half, and I got an elbow in the solar plexus that drove the wind out of me and would have doubled me over if there were room to double over. And the wave after that was like a mosh pit, and the wave after that was like an earthquake, and the wave after that was like—it was like being in a crowd of hundreds of thousands of people where panic had seized the night and was driving us insane.

  Then someone had a brilliant idea.

  “Mic check!”

  I was irritated at first. Who the hell thought giving a speech at this juncture was going to improve things? But of course, it wasn’t about giving a speech, it was about getting through the crowd’s animal nature and to its human brain, the part that knew that pushing and shoving was a disaster waiting to happen.

  “Mic check!” I called back, and others joined it.

  “Mic check!”

  “Mic check!”

  The call rippled out in concentric circles through the humanswarm, and where it was heard, calmness came. A police snatch squad barreled past me, so close I could have stuck out a foot to trip them, but I did nothing, didn’t even flinch. There was a calmness descending on me now, that calmness from the temple, the calmness I’d always sought in moments like this but found so rarely.

  One of the husky SFPD guys was heading my way, various pieces of gear clipped to his belt, stuff that I found myself eyeing up curiously despite myself, wanting to know what all those gadgets were about. He stopped a few people away from me, facing a woman and a man who looked like they could have been my parents’ friends, the sort they sometimes met for dinner and a show, back in the good days.

  The policeman spoke to them authoritatively, and they both produced IDs. The policeman held up a PDA and snapped a photo of each, the ID briefly illuminated in a grid of red laser light, like a supermarket checkout. He stared at his display for a moment, then put it away. Next, they talked intensely for a few minutes, and then the couple handed over their phones, tapping out unlock codes first. They must have been in a radio-frequency shadow, shielded from the HERF blast, leaving their phones in working order. The officer stared at the cable jacks on the phone’s underside for a minute before he pulled out a matching cable and inserted it. The cable ended with one of those intriguing boxes on his belt, and I thought I understood what was going on: the police were checking people, logging them, and copying all the data off their phones before letting them go.

  I was agog. Somehow, this was worse than the snatch squads who’d taken people out of the crowd without so much as a word. Those phones would have so many intimate details of their owners’ lives. Passwords. Address books of friends and family. GPS logs of all the locations they’d visited. Browser logs of all the websites they’d loaded. Their IMs, wall updates, tweets. I couldn’t believe it.

  When the officer was done, he took a pen out of a little arm-holster and scrawled something on the back of each of their hands. The couple were looking glazed-over and horrified. The officer smiled at them and explained something in detail, and they nodded in stunned silence.

  The officer gave them a friendly slap on the shoulder and pointed, sending them off through the crowd. I moved to intercept them.

  “Hey,” I said. “Hey, wait!”

  They stopped.

  “What did he say to you? The cop, I mean.”

  The man—about sixty, with a friendly face and a neat little mustache and a soft Southern accent—said, “He said we could show this to anyone who stopped us and they’d let us through.” He held up his hand, showed me the mark. It looked like a graffiti tagger’s mark, a scribble. Maybe it was his initials. “Special ink,” the man said.

  “Did he make a copy of your phones?”

  The woman nodded. She was about the same age, with a good haircut and chunky wooden jewelry around her neck and wrists, like an old hippie maybe. “Yeah. And he deleted our photos.” She frowned. “I had some pictures of my grandchildren on there.” They both spoke like they were in a dream or a nightmare.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Yeah,” they said, and moved off.

  The officer had moved on to someone else. He scanned the ID, took the phone. This time, he searched the guy. The guy was black. Maybe that had something to do with it. The cop searched his bag, his pockets. By then, the guy’s phone had locked up again and the cop made him unlock it. The guy looked like he wanted to cry—or hit the cop. The cop was clearly enjoying this. He scribbled on the guy’s hand and sent him on his way.

  Ange and Lemmy had been watching, too. We exchanged horrified looks. Another snatch squad sent a shock wave rippling through the crowd, and this time I did fall over, scraping my palms a little on the ground. The pain seemed to wake me up. I knew what I had to do.

  “Mic check!” I called.

  Ange gave me an alarmed look.

  “Mic check!” I called again.

  Ange repeated it. So did Lemmy. The call went around.


  “The police are recording IDs.

  “And copying the data off your phones.

  “And erasing the photos.

  “Without a warrant.

  “Without charges.

  “This is illegal.

  “It’s a crime.

  “It’s still a crime when the police do it.

  “The police don’t get to make up the law as they go.”

  The officer caught this and looked up at me. I resisted the temptation to speak faster. The People’s Mic required slow, measured speech.

  “Don’t comply.

  “Demand a lawyer.

  “Refuse to allow them to break the law.”

  The cop was moving toward me now, plowing through the crowd, reaching for something on his belt. Pepper spray? A Taser? No—a long plastic handcuff strip.

  “I think he’s going to arrest me now.

  “For telling you to uphold the law.

  “Think about that.”

  The policeman was close enough to reach out and grab me when a guy stepped out of the crowd and interposed himself between me and him. I only saw his back—a green Army-surplus parka with a head of long hair protruding from it. He had three earrings in his left ear and two in his right. I saw it all in photographic clarity, limned with the light from the officer’s flashlight.

  The policeman tried to sidestep him, but two more people stepped in his way. Then more. I took a step back and people closed ranks around me. The officer shouted something. No one repeated it. He didn’t have the People’s Mic.

  “You can go now.”

  I don’t know what possessed me to say it. It just popped out.

  “You can go now.” The crowd repeated it, the sound rippling out.

  “You can go now.” It became a chant. “You can go now.”

  Four little words. Not “Screw you, pig!” or “This is what democracy looks like.” Instead, it was a group of people asserting that they were capable of looking after themselves, and dismissing the “public servant” who’d come along to send them off to bed like naughty children.

  “You can go now.”

  The cop stopped. His expression had changed from the confident, condescending friendliness with which he’d addressed the people he’d searched to something between rage and terror. His hand moved toward his belt, which was hung with all sorts of things that had pistol grips or aerosol buttons—“nonlethal” weapons he could use to shock us, gas us, immobilize us. More people joined the crowd between the cop and me, and I had to stand on tiptoes to see that behind him, the crowd had parted, leaving a clear walkway for him to turn around and leave.

  “You can go now.”

  Hundreds of us were chanting it now. We weren’t angry anymore. And we weren’t laughing, either. There was no mockery in this. We’ve got this. You’re not needed. Go do something else. That’s what it meant.

  “You can go now.”

  The cop turned on his heel and walked slowly away, his head held high, chin out, shoulders rigid. Even though he had been on the verge of gassing me a moment before, I felt a moment’s pity for him. All he had was authority, and we’d taken that away from him. Now he was just a man in a kid’s dress-up future-soldier costume, retreating from the “civilians” he was supposed to be guardian and master to.

  A sound is just a shock wave, vibrating at a certain pitch and frequency. In thin air, there aren’t many molecules for the shock wave to push ahead of itself, so the sound travels slowly and dies quickly. But in dense substances—steel and stone and water—sound travels fast and for a long, long way, because the shock wave has so much material to work with as it pushes forward and out.

  We were packed in dense and thick, and our ideas traveled like sound vibrating along a steel beam. You can go now was rippling away from us like rings in a pond. The crowd lurched toward Market Street: one step, two steps. After a day of gathering—gathering our numbers and our strength—we were on the march. We were going to go somewhere.

  Ange twined her fingers with mine, and I threw my arm around Lemmy’s neck. We must have looked like Dorothy, the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow setting off down the Yellow Brick Road. Another step. You can go now. And so can we. Another step.

  I had just a moment’s warning—a general commotion, angry shouts, an elbow in the back as the person behind me was shoved forward—and then the snatch squad had me.

  * * *

  It was just a confusion of hands at first. Strong hands, all over my body. Then a meaty arm put me in a headlock, squeezing hard on my neck, choking so hard I couldn’t get a sip of air down my throat. The hands on my arms yanked them behind my back, twisting them painfully in some kind of martial arts come-along hold that made me feel like they would be torn off at the shoulders.

  The plastic handcuff bit cruelly into my left wrist and I’d have screamed if I’d had the breath for it. I thrashed instead, and there was a red-black haze creeping in around the edges of my vision. I registered screaming—Ange, other voices—and was lifted off my feet briefly and shoved this way and then that.

  And then I was on the ground, gasping for breath, and the hands were gone. Ange was beside me, and she grabbed my goggles and pulled them over my eyes and pulled my mask up over my mouth, her fingers shaking with haste and desperation. I brought my hands up to help her and saw that the plastic cuff was still fastened to my left wrist—but not my right. I levered myself to my feet, feeling like I might retch at any minute. Lemmy was standing beside me, his jacket torn, seeping blood from an ugly, swelling bruise on his cheek. He pressed one hand to the wound and gave me a quick thumbs-up with the other.

  “What happened?” I said.

  “You were de-arrested,” Ange said, matter-of-factly. I looked around. A guy with wild dreadlocks beside me was wearing what looked like a police-issue gas mask and carrying what was definitely a police-issue riot shield. Behind him, a short woman was wearing a police helmet. A few more police helmets bobbed around the crowd.

  “What did they do to the cops?” I said.

  Lemmy shrugged. “Not much. Took their stuff as they retreated. Don’t worry, no one beat up a cop or anything.”

  We were still on the march. The crowd took another shuddering step toward Market Street. The mask over my face made it hard to breathe, and my goggles were fogging up. I was just about to clean them when the gas fell.

  They were dropping it from nearly invisible, nearly silent black aerostats, little toy blimps that used whispering electric motors to keep themselves in place. I’d helped build some at Noisebridge once, a side project of the space-program team, who had also launched a lighter-than-air weather balloon with two cameras into the upper atmosphere, snapping pictures of the planet below it, curving away like the ball we knew it to be but could never see. The aerostats were as light and flimsy as a dry cleaner’s plastic suit bag. The way they hovered in place was eerie—prod one with your finger and it would waft away like dandelion fluff, then return to the exact same location with tiny, precise bursts from its little fans. The ones I’d played with had reminded me of jellyfish, and not in a good way. They were like brainless, drifting aliens, and I’d instinctively feared them. Like they might have a sting waiting for the unwary.

  The gas canisters slung under their bellies released their payloads with little near-synchronized pops, popcorn kernels detonating in a pan, and we all looked up at once, then—

  —Panic.

  The gas had been released from four or five yards over our heads, far enough up that it formed a drifting cloud that you could actually watch for a moment, which we did, and then as the reality of the falling chemical poison sank in, we all tried to simultaneously hit the ground and run away, anything to get away from the floating, descending toxin.

  I was jostled this way and that, knocked to the ground, stamped on—one hard boot landed on my head, another got me in the kidney—dragged to my feet by anonymous hands, shoved, knocked down again, picked up again.

  Then the choking started
, and with it, choked screams. Then vomiting. Maybe there was something in the gas to make you puke, or maybe it was its victims’ bodies trying desperately to expel the noxious foreign substance from every orifice. I was splashed with puke from all sides, and I slipped in it as I got to my hands and knees, then to my knees, then to my feet.

  I’d caught some of the gas through my painter’s mask, but not much. I was having a little trouble breathing, and my eyes were watering inside my goggles from the irritants that had climbed up my sinuses. I was half blind and it was dark, and there was only one thing I could think: Ange.

  I scanned for her, but couldn’t find her. A few other people had gotten to their feet, and I heard and then saw quadcopters and gliders start to crisscross the airspace over our heads again. I was sure they had their nightscopes on and were getting lots of footage. I supposed they’d be able to get nice, long, clear pictures of anyone who showed up with goggles and masks—“troublemakers” who’d come expecting that the police would deploy chemical agents against them for having an opinion.

  I called Ange’s name through my mask, and it came out muffled, and when I breathed deep to shout louder, I caught a mouthful of the chemicals clinging to the mask’s outside, sucked through its pores and around its sides, and doubled over coughing, swallowing hard to keep from vomiting. I did not want to vomit into my mask, and I did not want to take my mask off and show my face.

  I started grabbing the people on the ground around me and helping them to their feet. I had no idea where Ange was, but if she was one of those people thrashing in their own vomit on the ground, I hoped that someone was helping her up.

  I reached for a big guy with a short, military brush cut who was holding his head and groaning, and something stopped me, rooted me to the spot with an irrational icicle of fear stabbing me right in the spine. I squinted at the man, and then it hit me—an ugly gnarl of scar tissue that ran from the crown of his head to his thick neck. I’d seen it before, in the back of an all-black luxury car whose back doors had no handles. It was Knothead, the Zyz goon.