The Loudness

by Nick Courage

  It’s dread.

  “Did what?” I ask, knowing as the words escape my lips that she’s right. The dirty white cooler he was so worried about. The argument I only half heard. The mountain he said he didn’t blow up. I immediately regret the disbelief in my voice as Ava slides her back down the window, turning away from the City and sprawling on the cold tile floor with a discouraged sigh. I slide down next to her.

  Now it’s my turn to feel like I’m going to puke.

  Instead, I stare into the dark library alongside Ava, waiting for her to elaborate. My eyes had adjusted to the slight light outside, but the inside of the library is still blacked out, and the surge I’ve been feeling since the explosion is knotting in my chest. I try to massage it down through my shirt, deeply kneading my pulsing muscles and ribs, but can’t quite get to the charges that have started coursing through my core.

  It doesn’t make sense, I think, clenching my jaws to keep from freaking out. The City’s powered down; there’s nothing to mess up my heart anymore. But something is happening. I can’t deny that when I can actually feel energy surging through my body, giving me all-over goosebumps. But I’m not slipping away like before. Something new is happening. Something growing, spasming. I trace small circles against the tips of my forefingers with my thumbs and feel the charge building in my shuddering hands . . . not quite crackling, but buzzing slightly, painlessly, as the pressure in my chest lessens.

  I hold and release, testing, then hold again, letting the current through.

  After a few long moments, Ava hesitantly breaks the silence. “Did you think it was weird that Tom and Rachel chose Carel to drive us here?” she asks, her question echoing out into the encompassing quiet.

  “I . . . dunno,” I mumble, distracted. My fingers are pressed together like batteries to wires, their tips itching with excess charge. Everything’s weird, is what I meant to say. The Green Zone was weird; the Other Side was definitely weird; my whole stupid heart thing is weird, and the worst; and being here—holed up in the City, waiting out a riot with something growing in my chest. “There’s no way Tom and Rachel are behind this,” I say, tapping the back of my head against the glass to indicate the frenzy outside, not wanting to pry my steepled, throbbing hands apart. “If that’s what you’re saying.”

  “I don’t really think they are,” she says. “It’s just—it feels complicated.”

  Somewhere in the blackness, Julia barks, accompanied by plodding, scraping footsteps. Paralyzed with sudden fear, Ava seizes up beside me. I’d join her, but I’m too hypnotized by my fingers to be concerned about company. They’re stiff, cramped with current and . . . glowing, slightly. I’d have missed it if I wasn’t paying attention, or if it wasn’t quite as dark in the library. But, after staring at them for almost a full minute now, it’s inescapable. My fingers are tingling; almost imperceptibly emanating a cold, white light.

  The uneven steps grow louder, along with increasingly excited yips and barks. Even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t have to look up from my pulsing fingers to know that Julia-the-dog found Carel; I know he’s in the room with us when the footsteps abruptly stop and Freckles takes a break from her paralysis to recoil, flattening herself silently against the window behind us.

  “Good,” Carel says as he plops onto the velvet sofa. “You’re awake.” His voice is jagged and dry, and he seems to have dropped his thick Belgian accent again. Julia jumps up next to him and, whining, sniffs at something on his thigh. I’m still too hypnotized by the pulsing current cycling through my peaked fingers—through my entire galvanizing body—to tear my eyes away. Now that my eyes have adjusted, I’m starting to see that the soft glow is actually a hundred thin strands of white-hot light coiling between my trembling hands.

  “It got ugly,” Carel is saying, stroking Julia’s thick head as she licks his leg. “Pickers jumped the roadblocks when lights went out. Looting for food. We didn’t—” he coughs violently, irritably hacking soot from the explosion onto the library floor. “Didn’t expect.”

  Ava’s voice, impossibly small in the enveloping blackness, breaks the ensuing silence. “The guns,” she says, almost whispering, still flat against the window. “The explosion . . . All those people, it . . . they were like us.”

  Carel seems to ignore her. “Got back fast as I could,” he says, coughing again, out of breath. “I felt bad to leave you here like a dead person.”

  I finally break out of my trance and look at Carel. Even veiled in the library’s shadows, I can tell that his whitening face is streaked with blood and ash; the fading sofa slowly darkening beneath him.

  “You’re hurt,” I shout, shocked into loudness. I start to jump up, to run over to him, but Ava grips the legs of my jeans tightly and pulls me down next to her trembling body. Only Julia-the-dog seems to acknowledge me, looking up from Carel’s lap with a lolling, bloody tongue. She’s cleaning his wounds, I think, swallowing the rising, sour bile before I actually vomit. Carel was shot.

  “Everyone else . . . the students. My friends. They leave after,” he says thickly between coughs, slipping back into broken English. He’s delirious, his eyes closed, but darting beneath purpling eyelids. “Your gramama only pay them for first half, anyway.”

  “My . . .” Grammy, I think, trailing off. I try to pull away from Ava, but her hand remains clenched on my jeans so tightly that I can barely move. “He’s shot,” I whisper, my voice quavering with a sudden anger. “He needs help!”

  “Shot after he blew up that building,” Ava answers matter-of-factly, barely audible but resolute. I’m not sure what to make of her calmness, and it momentarily startles me into inaction. Meanwhile, Carel continues to talk on the couch, his voice ratcheting weakly like a sugar-drowned engine.

  “Is war,” he says, so softly I can barely hear him despite the quiet of the library. “They take out power, we take out power. They steal your parents, we . . .”

  We steal your parents back.

  But Carel doesn’t say that.

  In fact, he doesn’t say anything.

  Instead, I feel Ava’s grasp loosen as he slumps limply into the blood-soaked couch cushions . . . and just like that, I don’t want to run to Carel anymore. Julia, sensing a change, wimpers inquisitively, mirroring my own pathetic impulse. Before long, the library is echoing with her sharp and mournful keening.

  “He’s not dead,” Ava says stiffly. “He can’t be.” I refuse to even think about it, not with Julia’s increasingly agitated barks and the City in chaos behind me. Not with Grammy behind all of this, and my parents still out there. Waiting for the second half of a plan that’s never going to happen—that can’t happen—with Carel motionless on the sofa.

  “He’s not dead,” I agree, slowly backing against the window. “Just . . .”

  “Henry,” Ava says, tugging on my shirt as Carel’s arm falls heavily against the cold, tiled floor. “I think he might be, though. Right?”

  We’re both pressed against the window again, shivering against the glass—as far away from Carel as possible—when, somewhere beneath us, a door slams with a heavy metallic thunk. My breath catches in my throat and holds. Our best-case scenario is that it’s Carel’s returning friends, and they just helped him blow up the City.

  Our worst-case scenario . . .

  “No more waiting,” Ava says, stepping purposefully away from the window, her head cocked. Listening. Muffled footsteps reverberate between the floor and ceiling tiles, but they’re impossible to place. Except that they’re getting closer. “Let’s go!”

  Ava breaks into a run before me, her slapping footfalls resounding like shotgun blasts in the marbled emptiness. Somewhere beneath us—or above, it’s difficult to tell—I can hear the phantom footsteps gaining momentum.

  I take off after her, slipping on the newspapers we’d left strewn on the floor as I pull on my sweatshirt; falling over my own legs as the phantom footsteps grow closer. Trying not to think about Carel. By the time I catch up with Ava in the library’s
pitch-black elevator bay, I’m panting and soaked in cold sweat. And still, she’s ahead of me—kicking open the emergency door and rocketing down the maintenance stairs.

  It’s pitch black in the windowless stairwell, and hot—sweltering compared to the periodicals wing we’d been hiding out in. I almost can’t hear Ava’s noisy descent over my own heavy panting. I hold my hands in front of me, hoping they’ll shed some light, but they’re glowing so subtly I start to doubt what I’d seen earlier: the coiling, jumping sparks. We’re leaping down steps four and five at a time now, landing in blind, crashing squats.

  Finally, I catch up with Ava on the ground floor. She’s leaning with her ear against a heavily stickered door, starkly illuminated by a lonely red exit sign which must be plugged into some sort of emergency system. I prick my ears too, but don’t hear any trace of the phantom footsteps . . . just the fading echoes of our own escape. Even in the near-total dark, I can tell from the crunching underfoot that it’s dirtier down here than in the rest of the library, littered with empty chip bags and soda cans and crumpled-up notices for long-past symposiums.

  “No use,” she says, shouldering the door open. “Too thick to hear through.”

  The stairwell, instantly humid, fills with greasy light and ash from the explosion, propelled inside by the deafening blades of a handful of low-flying helicopters. Ava pulls the door shut, cocooning us in darkness again, just as the now-familiar sound of gunfire makes its way into the stairwell, where it softly pops and hangs uncomfortably between us. I have no idea what they’re firing at out there, and my first wild hope is that it’s the military getting everything under control.

  Until I remember we’re against the military.

  Probably.

  “H-hey, Ava,” I say, my stomach in my throat. “Do you still have that address?”

  “Conor’s brother is a federale, Hank,” she answers into the door. “He won’t help us.”

  That’s when I hear them again: the phantom footsteps. They’re in the stairwell now, up a few flights and walking—not jumping, but growing louder with each passing second. There are voices as well, but I can’t make out what they’re saying. I just know they’re getting closer. Ava must hear them, too, but she doesn’t show it; she just leans her forehead against the door, not moving.

  “Hey,” I say, crinkling over the candy-wrappered floor as I walk toward her. “Who says he won’t help us?”

  The footsteps are louder now, the voices almost distinguishable. One of them sounds like it’s laughing, but not. It takes me a moment to realize it’s just someone saying Ha-Ha-Ha. I can’t imagine anyone laughing or even pretending to laugh with everything that’s happened, and a shiver runs down to the base of my spine, then shoots back up.

  “Them?” I ask. Ava’s still not really moving, just rolling her forehead listlessly against the door. “Listen,” I say. “Conor’s our friend, and I trust him. I trust our friends.”

  “Like Carel,” Ava says, the sarcasm in her voice breaking under the overwhelming futility of the situation. She sounds like she’s starting to cry, and I want to comfort her, but the footsteps are growing louder. There’s just not enough time . . .

  “Yeah,” I say. “Like Carel. I still trust Carel.”

  Ava laughs into the door, one sharp bark that sounds uncomfortably like the fake laugh of our pursuer. “Listen,” I say, forcing myself to remember the happy, mustachioed man at Food Eats and not the lifeless shadow upstairs. “He was . . . Carel is our friend. Whatever he did out here, he did it for us. For the Green. He wanted to help us.”

  She hesitates, and the phantom footsteps—still slowly descending—punctuate the silence. Doors open and slam shut at every floor, as if our pursuers don’t realize we went all the way down; they’re thoroughly casing the building.

  Everything just keeps getting more complicated.

  It could just be Carel’s friends, looking for us, wanting to help us now that Carel’s . . .

  Or it could be federales, looking for Carel’s friends.

  And even if they are Carel’s friends, neither Ava nor I are anxious to meet the people who blew up the city.

  And if they’re federales, well . . . Conor’s brother is apparently a federale, and with Grammy and Carel behind the bombing, it looks like Ava and I are the bad guys.

  There are too many possibilities and not enough information, just grainy newspaper photographs and Carel’s last words: “They steal your parents . . .”

  “You’re right,” Ava finally says, still talking into the door, but slowly pulling the crinkled address out of her hoodie pocket. “If this really is war, we have to be able to trust our friends.” I nod into the darkness, reaching out my hand for the slip of paper.

  My pulsing white hand.

  Ava’s eyes widen as the address flutters to the ground. “Henry,” she says, her voice barely audible, her mouth opening and shutting a few times before she finds her voice again. “You’re . . . g-glowing!”

  I’m doing more than glowing, though.

  My outstretched fingers are suspended in a thrumming sphere of the whitest, clearest light I’ve ever seen. My hand looks almost translucent inside of it, the atoms of my palm and fingers jumping around like the writhing core of some otherworldly sun. In slack-mouthed shock, I look to Ava for reassurance, noticing the long shadows I’m casting on the stairwell walls, and the strangely familiar graffiti beneath them.

  Colorful monsters with cartoon faces, like on the Other Side.

  Rachel.

  “These floors are all clear,” someone barks above us, breaking the trance. “Some action on the ground floor—gonna check it out.”

  “Quick,” Ava whispers, her eyes suddenly focused with purpose as she backs against the door. “Turn it off.”

  Turn it off?

  I flex my hand into a loose fist, testing to see if I have any control over the pulsing orb of light, but it just constricts and expands to twice its original size. My other hand twitches at my side, and, looking down, I notice with panic that it’s glowing as well. The leg it’s resting against is shockingly translucent, like my hand within the orb—atoms swirling and realigning. Hypnotic, like running water . . .

  Meanwhile, the phantom steps continue their methodical approach.

  Ava looks panicked, her face white with refracting light, but also strangely giddy. Her shadow, towering shakily behind her, grows taller as she steps toward my outstretched fist.

  “You have to turn them off, Hank,” she says, mesmerized. “We can’t go outside with you like this . . .”

  And we can’t stay in here, I think, painfully aware of every scraping footstep in the stairwell. Closing my eyes for concentration, I rub my thumbs in circles against my fingers like I did on the floor upstairs. When Carel was still alive. If this turned it on, it should turn it off, I hope, willing the crackling light out of my hands. It doesn’t seem to be working, though.

  Even with my eyes closed, I know I’m engulfed in a sea of white.

  “Hank,” Ava shrieks, and my eyes snap open to another color altogether. I’ve set the thick layer of trash covering the floor on fire, soda cans and chip bags blackening in licks of orange flames, flecked with chemical greens and blues. Ava’s backed against the exit door, her feet inches from the fire, but I seem to be standing in the middle of it, my hands still radiating with a blindingly white light. Less than a foot away from me is the crisping pile where Ava had dropped Conor’s brother’s crumpled address.

  Our last, best hope.

  “Hey,” someone yells, snapping me back into the moment. “You guys gotta get out of here!” My head jerks toward the voice, but my eyes refuse to focus on anything but Rachel’s graffiti, which is peeling off the sweating cinderblock walls in big, bubbling flakes. It’s strange, watching the paint melt. We should be melting, too, but the light—my light—is cool to the touch; I barely feel any heat from the flames licking at our heels. “Hey,” he shouts again, his voice ragged with smoke. “We’re h
ere to help.”

  I can see people crowding the first-floor landing now; I count about six of them looking down at us, their cheeks red from the fire. Our phantom footsteppers. Most of them look like Other Siders, patched jeans and threadbare shirts. The one who’s trying to get me and Ava to go with them, though, is in federale military fatigues—creased black pants and shining boots, a holstered gun at his hips.

  Complicating everything.

  “Hank,” Ava calls out, her voice sharply inquisitive, but muffled by her hand. Although we may be safe from the heat, the smoke is thickening, and—coughing—I realize that we really do need to get out while we’re still able. Ava’s shoulder is pressed against the door, waiting for my signal to make a break for it.

  “Not that way,” the federale pleads from the landing as Ava tentatively cracks the door open, feeding the hungrily reaching fire with a rush of crisp air, the chaos of the city joining the growing flames of the stairwell as Ava and I flatten against the still-cracked door. The federale strains to be heard over the sirens and helicopters and megaphones. “Not that way, they’re shooting . . .”

  The federale’s right. They’re shooting out there. Carel’s already . . . Carel’s proof of that. And with the address gone, there’s nowhere to go. We’d just be running blind, with me as a helpfully glowing target.

  “Please,” the federale yells again, shielding his face from the flames. “We don’t have much time.”

  “Time for what,” I shout back, my voice higher and shakier than I would have liked. I sound unhinged, like a crazy person. But we’re out of options, and that tends to make people crazy. The wrong choice could mean death, and not just for me, but for Ava and everyone. It’s too much, too complicated. It doesn’t help that we’re standing so close to my fire and I can smell the melting soles of our pursuers’ shoes, can hear them sticking to the floor . . .

  And I don’t know who the good guys and the bad guys are anymore.

  “Henry,” the federale yells again, urgency straining his voice. “We can get Mayor Long, but we need to act fast.”