The Loudness

by Nick Courage

  “Clean power from dirty river, get rid of federales . . . was good idea. Should have known they would want to steal.”

  I slouch down into my seat and, ignoring the crick in my neck, pull off my hoodie, stuffing it down by my feet, beneath the dash. It’s still stifling—even with the windows open, the air is so heavy I feel as if I’m drowning—but my arms are glistening with a cooling sweat and the breeze is a relief. I nudge Freckles with my elbow to suggest she do the same, but she just curls further into herself.

  I poke her again. Now that I’ve finally taken my sweatshirt off, it seems ridiculous that we were ever wearing them—it must be close to a hundred degrees and the sun’s not even out. But she groans quietly, still sick from the smell, and I decide not to push it.

  “People tell you end of world is coming,” Carel says, talking more to himself than to me or Freckles. “End of world is here.” He thumps himself on the chest. “I am apocalypse, you are apocalypse, all people are apocalypse. We are sickly bugs with smoke and poisons.”

  “Sickly bugs,” I repeat unthinkingly, snapping Carel out of his monologue.

  He shakes his head in frustration, indecipherable tattoos writhing on his neck. “Outside,” he says, and then mimics the deafening song of the cicadas with a throaty flourish. “Terrible singing.” I want to point out the absence of cicadas—the sickly bugs—as we drive through this industrial wasteland, but it just seems to prove his point.

  “No one is in belts,” he says, looking over at me and Freckles. “Stay safe in belts.”

  Belted up again, we drive without talking. Julia stays perched at the window, tongue lolling in the chemical breeze; Freckles slouches back down into herself, groaning occasionally; and I sit quietly, watching the landscape change. At first it’s all the same: eerily lit concrete as far as the eye can see, fenced in with chain link and barbed wire. Every so often, a jagged series of smokestacks punctuate the still-dark horizon.

  After a while, the endless sea of concrete gives way to rows of modest, mostly unlit houses. I lean forward expectantly, but the yards are strewn with trash and most of the windows seem to be broken. The houses are mostly squat and built from a strangely yellow brick, but otherwise, it’s exactly like the Grey Zone: torn curtains waving in blank windows like shredded ghosts, rusting memories strewn across grass so overgrown it waves and bends in our wake.

  Ruins.

  I didn’t know what to expect from the City, but it wasn’t this. Not more of the same old Grey. “Time to close windows,” Carel says, rolling his up and double-checking that the driver’s-side door is locked. Freckles just moans and curls tighter into herself. Slowing, Carel reaches over us and secures the passenger side. It’s instantly claustrophobic in the cab. Freckles unfolds herself unhappily and, sitting up, dryly whispers something about needing air. Julia-the-dog whimpers in agreement, but nobody makes a move to open the windows again.

  Outside, illuminated only by the pale light of the moon, are creeping shadows. I gasp as we’re suddenly surrounded . . . too startled to exhale. There are hundreds of them: gaunt, loosely-clothed specters stalking from house to house, shouldering bags full of what looks to be trash. As we drive past them, they’re so intent on rummaging through their landfill of a neighborhood that they barely look up in recognition of our passage.

  Only after the third ghoulish block does one of the pickers take notice of us, a woman roughly my mother’s age dragging a tattered suitcase across the street. Her face is dirty and tight, as if she barely has enough skin to cover it, and—as she’s caught in the soft glow of our one working headlight—we lock eyes. Hers seem to glow white, refracting the light from the truck, and I shiver despite the heat. She just smiles, though, standing stock-still in the middle of the street. It quickly becomes apparent that she’s not going to move, so Carel slows and veers the truck around her, continuing on into the night.

  “Civilization,” he spits bitterly, whistling through his teeth. “Is bad out here, yes?”

  “What was wrong with that lady?” Freckles asks, snapping out of her misery. “It was like she was—”

  She swallows the word, but I’m thinking it too.

  It’s like she was a zombie; the way her eyes glowed and her skin didn’t fit on her body. Her ghastly smile. The hair on the back of my neck is still standing on end, and my heart’s buzzing with a mixture of fear and otherworldly anticipation.

  “She’s just people,” Carel says dismissively, sensing our adrenalin rising. “All are just people. Poor people. Her, she was blind—cataracts from pollution. Not so strange here.”

  Without warning, Carel spins the wheel into an aggressive U-turn and curses to himself so quietly that I barely hear him over our squealing tires. My back tightens as we screech back into the crowd of Pickers. “Food bag,” Carel says gruffly, gesturing to us as he quickly rolls down his window. Freckles is quicker than I am and hands him the brown paper sack of radishes and other vegetables he’d packed for dinner.

  Carel rolls the top of the bag and drops it unceremoniously onto the street. None of the Pickers seem to notice, so he blasts the truck’s deafening horn twice and a hundred glowing eyes fix on us. “Just people,” he repeats, but we all exhale when he shifts into reverse, shooting backward into the darkness as the Pickers converge on our meager bag of food.

  We make our getaway in a silence that’s only broken after the Pickers are well behind us. “Suburbs,” Carel says, obviously sickened by the thought of them. “They live here, off trash. Sick people,” he repeats to himself, settling back into the road, and I admit to myself that it’s easier to feel sorry for them now that they’re safely behind us. I’m glad we helped them, though, even if it was just with those terrible radishes . . . but I can’t shake the blind woman’s terrifying smile out of my mind.

  We’ve rolled the windows back down, now that we’re alone again, but there’s no ambient noise from the outside world. No construction, no other cars. No cicadas—not even the bugs live here. It makes the Grey Zone look like paradise, I think, still shivering. Here, with all the Pickers, it feels lonelier . . . sadder. Freckles, so excited a few minutes ago, bites her bottom lip so hard it’s almost the same pale pink of her color-drained cheeks, and even Julia-the-dog seems downcast.

  “What do they do with the trash?” I ask, not really wanting to know but unable to sit through another prolonged silence. Carel shrugs his bear-like shoulders and shakes his head.

  “Burn it. Trade, with each other for more trash, or with the City, maybe, for food if they find something good. But . . . look,” he says, gesturing at the waste outside with outstretched palms. “Nothing here but trash and poison.”

  Freckles bursts into tears beside me, and I wrap my arm around her trembling shoulders. I try to imagine the Green Zone like this, a skeletal Mr. Moonie and Mrs. Wallace picking through broken scraps of the past as the City funnels the electricity from our dam back north, to the families of the men and women who stole the other Julia. And my parents.

  It doesn’t seem possible. We’d fight back . . . we are fighting back.

  Only now it just feels like we’re driving, and I remember how hungry I am, now that Carel’s dropped all our food for the trip out the window. I can’t blame him, but my stomach growls so loudly that it startles Freckles out of her tears and makes Carel jerk his head.

  “More food in back,” he says. “Best to eat before City.”

  Saying a silent prayer of thanks, I get on my knees and start rearranging the over-packed backseat. For the first time since we’ve left the Other Side, I let myself really worry about Tom and Rachel—Tom must have been nervous-to-breaking about the federales to ask Carel to carry so much of their stuff away from the Other Side and into the unknown.

  “There’s a cooler in the back,” Carel says from the front seat. “Red one.”

  I don’t see any red coolers, though . . . only dusty boxes bursting with records. I have a feeling the food is buried at the bottom of the pile, so I star
t rearranging. The first box I try to slide toward me is heavier than I thought it would be, though, and its worn cardboard flaps rip as other boxes collapse on top of it.

  “Careful,” Carel shouts from the front seat, peering back into the shadows as Freckles shifts, accommodating my kicking legs. “Red cooler, not white cooler.”

  Both coolers are wedged in the very back, behind the mess I’ve accidentally created and beneath a square something, covered with a dirty pink sheet. My relief at finding the food fades as I lift a corner of the sheet, revealing the painting beneath. It’s Rachel’s self-portrait, the one she finished right before we left, and it’s still glowing . . . even here in the dusty backseat of a too-hot truck, surrounded by empty-eyed Pickers and industrial poison. Her smile cuts through the darkness, and I swell with a sense of confidence I haven’t felt since I convinced Conor to night-bike with me to Food Eats.

  “Should be toward back,” Carel says. “Red cooler. Sandwiches inside. And coffee.”

  I crawl, sighing, toward the back and drag the red cooler toward me, careful not to disturb the dirty white cooler beside it, which Carel seems uncharacteristically anxious about. Inside, as Carel promised, is a tall green thermos and a stack of sandwiches wrapped loosely in wax paper. I unfold the topmost sandwich, pulling the paper down low enough to see a full cross-section.

  It’s even better than what I could have hoped for: an entire creamy-green half of an avocado sitting precariously on a generous chunk of cheese, balanced between chunks of golden brown bread at least an inch thick, with yellow sprouts spilling out the sides.

  I refold the wax paper and take stock of the cooler: there must be about ten of these in there, enough to feed us four times over. “Why,” I ask, slipping back into the front seat with a handful of sandwiches, the thermos of coffee wedged under my arm, “didn’t we have these for dinner?”

  Carel just shrugs and grabs a sandwich from my lap. “Was hungry for radish.”

  We eat our breakfasts in silence, taking turns slurping lukewarm coffee from Carel’s thermos as we drive through what’s left of the suburbs. I wonder what time it is; it feels like we’ve been driving through the darkness forever, but it must still be the middle of the night. There’s still no sign of dawn on the horizon, only an ethereal blue shimmering in the distance, much brighter than the fluorescent lighting of the industrial sector we passed earlier.

  Even though I’ve never been outside of the Zone, I know what it is. I can feel it in the accelerated beating of my mechanical heart.

  The City.

  It’s pulsing with electricity, waves of power radiating off its jagged skyline, funneling the life from the impoverished surrounding suburbs just to shoot it out into the empty night sky. The darkness surrounding us seems more black in comparison, and I can’t tell if it’s the muddy coffee, the anticipation of the City, or the rippling electrical charge in the air that’s making my chest buzz.

  I kind of like it, the excitement. We’d spent so many hours and days just hiding out, waiting and running. It’s like the universe is letting us know that we’re getting close to something big.

  That it’s time to finally stand up for ourselves.

  After being so hungry for so long, Carel’s exploding avocado sandwiches taste almost unreal—it’s only when I’m halfway through my second one that I’m convinced I haven’t hallucinated them. With each bite, I feel stronger. With each slopping sip of coffee, I feel more resolved to take on the City. To keep the Green Zoners from becoming like the Pickers. Freckles squeezes my knee meaningfully between bites, so I know she feels it, too. The anticipation . . . the jitters.

  Even though we still don’t have any plans, and it’s just us against an entire throbbing city of federales.

  “Might be close enough now,” Carel announces through a wet mouthful of coffee and bread as he fiddles with the chipped knobs of the antique dashboard radio. It takes a few seconds to warm up, slowly lighting from within with a soft orange glow, the speakers crackling with white noise. Carel tweaks the knob so quickly that the channels run together in an incomprehensible blur until he settles on a wavelength at the far left of the dial. There’s still some static in the signal, and he unsuccessfully attempts to twist it into perfection as a squeaky-voiced DJ stutters through the empty night.

  “Still too far,” he says, slumping back into his seat, frustrated by the fuzz. It could be that we’re too far away, but more likely it’s my heart. I decide not to say anything—so far I’ve been lucky, and bringing up my aluminum foil-wrapped life seems like it would just jinx everything. Besides, incredibly, I recognize the song the DJ just introduced as “a brutal demo by everyone’s favorite friends in the underground, Big Dumb River . . .”

  I mean, I don’t actually recognize the song, but the screeching voice is definitely Rachel’s, and I can almost see Tom playing his angular, shrieking guitar like the first time I saw them . . . with Dad, on our first trip to the Other Side. Just as the drums and bass kick in, Carel twists the volume up so it’s loud enough to overpower the jangling truck and the ripping wind.

  It’s funny how it hits me.

  Like I’m back at The Corner with Conor, the dance-scuffed floor bouncing beneath our feet to the frenzied rhythm of the entire Other Side jumping along to Tom and Rachel’s squealing feedback. I get goosebumps remembering the sound—the way it moved through me, vibrating into my bones, down into my blood and back.

  It’s almost better in the truck, because we’re moving, too, hurtling away from entire weeks spent hiding out in the dusty Library attic, surveying the construction and the slugs in the garden below. Away from nutraloaf and doing nothing; from the still-moldy wreckage of Before.

  Even with everything so messed up, it’s better to be on the road.

  Carel hangs his arm outside of the truck and beats a heavy hand against the metal of the door in clanging, off-beat time with the music while Freckles feeds Julia-the-dog her crust, laughing as her broad pink tongue searches for crumbs. I move to finger the creased slip of paper with Conor’s brother’s information on it, but it’s in the sweatshirt I took off, on the floor.

  I tell myself to get it later, then squeeze my eyes shut and let Tom and Rachel’s driving music wash over and through me. It’s almost like I’m outside of my body again, like I’m having an episode.

  But different.

  I’ve never felt so much like myself, I think, deeply inhaling the hot cross-breeze and reaching for a victorious swig of cold coffee. Never felt so much a part of the world.

  “Friends run station,” Carel shouts by way of explanation. “Is part of school.”

  Both Freckles’s and my heads snap toward Carel.

  “School?”

  After the brutality of the federales and the inhumanity of the Pickers in the suburbs, it hadn’t occurred to us that the City would be anything other than a totally militarized zone—that it might harbor a place like the Library, or anyone like Mr. Moonie, slightly rumpled and intoning war-ravaged poetry and historical anecdotes to the children.

  That there would even be kids in there.

  “Well, college,” Carel explains as he turns down the radio, insinuating finger quotes with the shrug in his voice. “City has some good things, too. But mostly bad.”

  “And the federales just let them do whatever they want?” Freckles asks, incredulous. It seems amazing that the black-suited men and women who bruised Grammy and shut down the Zone would tolerate Other Sider rock and roll. Especially broadcast from within the City limits.

  “Is not much of a resistance,” Carel says dismissively. “Federales too busy, not worrying about students or music.”

  We slow as we near the City, which looms large and bright before us. High-rises—hulking shadows stretching implausibly skyward from the ambient glow of the city—seem to pierce the starless sky, and it’s not until Freckles tugs at my arm a couple of times that I’m able to pry my attention away from them.

  “What?” I whisper, my eyes
flickering back to the towering skyline, each building buzzing with more power than the Green Zone could use in a lifetime. Freckles yanks on my hand again and nods toward the road ahead, a pained look on her unnaturally illuminated face. Four black jeeps are parked on either side of the road, a few hundred yards down the highway. The drivers, dressed in black military uniforms—not suits—stand at attention in the center of the street, thrown into dramatic contrast by the blinding floodlights they’ve set up at intervals around their roadblock.

  “Backseat,” Carel says, a tremor in his husky voice. “Dog too.”

  I let Freckles crawl into the back of the cab first, then whistle to Julia-the-dog. She’s curled up beneath the dashboard, resolute. I try to drag her up onto the seat by her studded collar, but she just rolls away, thick neck straining against my feeble tugs.

  “Come on, girl,” Freckles whispers, patting her thighs. Julia’s ears perk, and she launches up onto the frayed plastic bench and over the top of the seat, into Tom’s packing catastrophe and Freckles’ arms. There’s not much room back there, but I carefully follow, wedging myself up against Freckles and Julia as Carel pulls a thick curtain closed in front of us.

  Except for the floodlights, visible even through the knobby curtain, it’s completely dark in the backseat. And cramped. I’m perched on a stack of loose records from the box I ripped earlier, and the sharp corner of another box pokes me right between my shoulder blades as Julia-the-dog rearranges herself so she’s half-sitting on my lap and half-sitting on Freckles. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible, but it’s even hotter behind the curtain, and soon the stale air in the back of the cab smells almost completely of Julia’s panting, radish breath—erasing any daring thoughts I may have had of one last kiss before our capture. There’s nothing to do but sweat and watch the floodlights grow through the curtain as we approach the roadblock.

  “Checkpoint,” a metallic voice calls out, a federale amplified by a loudspeaker. Freckles trembles against my sweat-slick arm as Carel slows the truck, and I wish there was something I could do to reassure her . . . but all we can do is hide. “Please bring your vehicle to a complete stop and turn off the engine, sir.”