For Ally, who waited
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many people had a part in the creation of this story. First, there are those without whose company the story simply wouldn’t have come together. Aaron Leis, Ryan Cornelius, Maxwell Cozad, Michael McConnell, Tom Preston, Haj Ross, Srdjan Smajić, Barth Anderson, Mark Teppo, Berrien Henderson, and my parents, Layne and Jamye Bradley, all contributed to the collection of my ideas, and I owe them a tremendous debt for doing so.
Then there are those without whose criticism and feedback I simply couldn’t have articulated the story. Liz Cornelius and Kip Nettles both deserve my special thanks.
And then there are those without whom the story simply wouldn’t have seen print. My agent, Kristopher O’Higgins, and my editors, David Pomerico and Juliet Ulman, all worked vigorously to see the full realization of the story. Without them, there would be nothing.
And finally there is one who did all of these things, without whom none of it would matter. My wife, Rima Abunasser, who believed.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
A Conversation With the Author
About the Author
Copyright
CHAPTER ONE
we got the jump because we lived near the square. Walking distance. Slade was like most small Texas towns—it radiated outward from the old courthouse. At some point, someone had paved the original hitching yards and erected a cenotaph for the Civil War dead. There were water fountains on each pillar, each with its own inscription: WHITE. COLORED. They both still worked. There were pecan trees with dubious histories.
Livery posts, hardware stores, and hotels had clustered slowly around the squared avenue—the buildings still stared at the courthouse-turned-museum, the remnants of their painted-brick signs now protected by city codes. Those businesses were all something else now—candy shops, bars, high-end boutiques. But they had several signs each. Meyer’s Pawn was the most important to us. Guitars and drum sets and stereos filled its storefront windows—the ejecta of the nearby university. Its bread-and-butter music program, mostly. Slade still lived because the university owned most of it. Sweet Pine, Siwash, and Minnie Falls, all nearby, had dried up when they were supposed to, half a century before. When Slade should’ve gone.
But we didn’t care about instruments. Meyer’s had tools, too.
We got the jump. We’d been watching Salvage for months, so we knew what to do.
We knew enough.
After television broadcasts went fully digital, people began to Salvage the analog waves. The low-end frequencies the FCC didn’t sell off or restrict for their Nationwide Public Safety Network. Which was just for first responders, emergency personnel. The police.
At first, the public air was monitored, regulated in a dying-grandfather sort of way. Special needs. Suicide watch. The FCC called it the Citizens’ Television Band.
In the early days, ’casts were still pirate. It took a year or so before the waves went Salvage, and you could do whatever you wanted with a broadcast antenna and a video phone. It was shortwave television. Narrow-band. Retro-hip all the way from the mechanical TVs of the Great Depression.
Modders stopped retooling old eight-bit video game consoles and mini fridges and started finding ways to improve the Salvage band. We were lucky—we didn’t have to mod anything to tune in. My father’s old garage TV never stopped working. Black-and-white. Eight-inch screen. It doubled as a radio.
Slade had more Salvage than most cities around it. It had college kids with plenty of money, plenty of equipment, and plenty of paranoia. They’d all been raised by the American Dream. Their teachers had told them they’d be astronauts and presidents and famous actors. They were middle class, mostly white, in a public education system that might as well have been private—they didn’t know then how the property taxes on their parents’ multistory homes determined their share of “equal education for all.” They’d followed the rules, earned the grades, dreamed big and endless. And then in Slade, people handed them beer and hash pipes, had sex with them, told them it was all right not to know what the hell was going on. They Grouped themselves without knowing it—a hive-mind that kept them from being alone, that told them the bottom was about to fall out of everything they’d ever been told. Told them to expect it, to get ready. To learn about Salvage. To trust no one.
Even with all their money—all their equipment—it was the paranoia that served them best.
Some days, the Salvage was too thick—the anxiety, the hurriedly wired amps throbbing more power into each ’cast. Every panicked ’caster doing his best to get his truth through all the others’. They ended up jamming one another, like Cold War cryptographers. Numbers and catchphrases and cardinal directions squealed in and out of one another on the bad days. Some modders did nothing but jam, and their squealing tech made paranormal sounds through the TV’s tiny speaker.
They were making noise. ’Casting themselves into the drone. Because it was nice not to be alone.
We had favorites. ’Casts that were stronger than others. And their owners left graffiti all over town. Stencils like stenographs on municipal servo boxes and in bathroom stalls. Wildstyle graffiti in the bar that was once a bank. Eventually, for those of us on the inside, we learned the jammers’ habits, their schedules, so we knew when to listen for the real warnings—the real reports on what was happening. More importantly, what wasn’t happening. With the whole country. Before the Event.
You could match graffiti to frequencies and parse new messages all across town. A sort of patchwork bulletin board that couldn’t be hacked, couldn’t be shut down or traced. Which is how we knew.
We had pieced together our first Plan. Knew how to get started. How to get the jump. We couldn’t afford most things—guns or food or medical supplies. We planned to Forage for these, after the Event.
If we tried to steal everything, we would’ve just been arrested and thrown in jail. We’d be fucked when things Collapsed.
But we were going to need things. Primarily, we were going to need to get out of Slade. To get out of everything. After the Collapse, the town would get hungry. And other people would have guns.
The Collapse was like a Renaissance Faire. In my mind, they were the same. Some years before, my best friend Adam and I had gone together. Turkey legs, incense, cornets of roasted almonds. That sort of thing. We’d spent most of our adolescence playing Dungeons & Dragons—old school. Second editions from the 1980s that had been my uncle’s. So we knew about trebuchets and scorpions—the difference between a glaive-guisarme and a fauchard fork. The numbers of another generation, of the Gen Xers with their hybrid engines and text messages. 14 16 15 17 17: saving throws for a first-level fighter. The unforgettable code of every Silicon Valley headcase who’d gone from twelve-sided dice to stock options and copyrights. We knew these things. We bought swords at the Ren Faire. Unsharpened things that had to be peace-bound while we stomped around the fields in the mud, paying older kids to buy us beer. They were carbon steel, which was important. They would take an edge, but that would nullify the warranty.
• • •
When word came through Salvage about the bank runs and the r
iots—long before it slipped through the FCC feed, before it interrupted programs and slid semi-transparently, like a snake’s skin, across the bottom of every digital display in the country—we got the jump. Before anybody panicked. Salvage had been watching the silent bank runs, the electronic ones, for weeks. It knew who was going to start throwing things, in which cities, almost before the demonstrators themselves did. It knew who had been out of a job, and for how long. Who couldn’t buy bread. Who had sick children.
Salvage had long since silenced the hobbyists—the ’casters who weren’t up to anything more than teaching people to play the guitar, or crochet, or to understand the Bible. If you hadn’t found a way in, if you hadn’t cracked our codes, it was just noise. Nonsense. The only integrity behind jamming had been to silence the Outsiders first.
Salvage had become self-aware.
There were only two of us, Adam and me, but we’d need others, to grow strong, to be safe. And we’d have to either recruit them or intimidate them. So we began with swords. With getting edges.
When word came through, when the jamming stopped and everything harmonized into a layered fugue chanting the one mantra that meant the same thing to every conspiracy-head, deviant, and tagger, we ran to the square. To Meyer’s.
… This assumes that you will kill other people….
We left our swords on the kitchen counter—the Faire was just beginning—because they didn’t have edges. There wouldn’t be disorder, not yet, so they would just get in the way. We threw a cinder block through the front window of the pawnshop, and it lodged at a slow angle through the skin of a kick-drum on display.
… It assumes that a new competition for resources has begun….
We were fifteen years old again, a wall of old toasters and secondhand TVs and abandoned jewelry an open stall before us. We were standing on broken glass wrapped in Faire smells—sautéed onions and garlic. We listened to broken music from the bar next door … that there are resources yet available … while we were stealing a bench grinder. We were thinking in numbers and obscure acronyms. We were thinking 14 16 15 17 17, THACO, hit points. We were thinking, What are the numbers for a good strike with a sword? Which dice do we roll?
Nothing had fully Collapsed yet. We got the jump. But it was Before, so we were just criminals. We were running, as best we could, with a bench grinder, back to our duplex near campus. The first step was to put edges on our swords, so we would be strong.
… primarily, the Event involved ab initio (or has since developed) an economic revolution … We didn’t need a generator at that point because the electrical grid was still alive then. The Northern Lights would come later.
We were running. We were several ages at once, the present-and future-past. Stealing a bench grinder was many things at once—Ren Faires and running only two of the more obvious.
THE BOOK:
“ONE”
[1] (i) This Book assumes many things. (ii) Among them, that you are still alive. (iii) It assumes that the world has not been destroyed by fire, that it has not developed radiation flats and a meteorology of fallout. (iv) It assumes there has been a breakdown. (v) It assumes that a new competition for resources has begun; that there are resources yet available; and that primarily, the Event involved ab initio (or has since developed) an economic revolution.
[2] (i) The destabilization of Trade informs the competition for resources—conflict, nationalism, religion, and consciousness are all Narratives for securing these. (ii) These will be your ready tools.
[3] (i) This assumes that you will kill other people. (ii) Begin identifying the people beyond your Group as Outsiders as quickly as possible. (iii) Begin before the Event, if you are able.
[4] (i) You will need a Place, and it will require a name. (ii) Your Place is your strongest Narrative.
“TWO”
[1] (i) If your Place serves also as your residence prior to the Event, then there are a number of preparations you can make. (ii) Of course, stockpiling firearms, ammunition, fuel, preserved or preservable foods, and medical supplies is a priority. (iii) However, overpreparation can lead to disaster (cf 2.1.iv-2.1.v). (iv) If your Place is too near an urban center, then Outsiders may attempt to Forage it for supplies or shelter. (v) If your Place is overprepared, it loses mobility, which is among a Group’s most primary survival characteristics.
[2] (i) A Group inhabiting a Place too near an urban center will endure considerable Administrative stress in the process of negotiating with potential Additions to the Group, for this negotiation inevitably includes a number of necessary eliminations–Rejections that stress the Place’s perimeter. (ii) This is problematic, for in this instance, your Group will be forced to eliminate Rejections before your Narrative has solidified against the psychological damage that can result from doing so. (iii) A Group requires time to identify not only itself but also its Outsiders. (iv) For this reason, situate your Place an appropriate distance away from any urban center. (v) Given time, a Group will stabilize its Narrative such that Additions and Rejections will not stress Administration.
CHAPTER TWO
the thing about a bench grinder is that it’s loud, and it draws a lot of amps. The wiring in our place was old and jury-rigged as it was. Bolting the grinder onto the kitchen counter and unplugging the microwave to free up an outlet meant more than just fucking up the carpentry—we were taking a risk with the breaker. If our place was going to burn, we didn’t want to be the ones to ignite it. Not yet, at least.
But we had to sharpen our swords inside, where we’d attract less attention—if any. Slade was still quiet at this point, still largely unaware. We hoped people would think we were flipping the place—college guys with parents’ money, trying to dip their toes into real estate. We’d even stolen a real estate sign and paid a design major to do us up a SLADE RENOVATIONS AND REPAIR decal we could stick over the Realtor’s. We put my phone number on there, just in case. We told the guy the company was to hedge our bets—to get some business going before we graduated, in case being interdisciplinary studies majors didn’t pan out.
He told us to keep him in mind, for brochures and the like.
We didn’t know how long we had until someone noticed the break-in at the pawnshop, until someone noticed the sound of a bench grinder running at night. We honestly didn’t know if anyone would have time to notice. Who knew when Slade would start falling apart, which would make a hell of a lot more noise than sharpening swords would.
Jo, our neighbor who lived behind and above us, wouldn’t care. She knew us. She knew we did things like this. We didn’t know the neighbor who lived across the shared driveway. It never came outside, even though, every night, without interruption, we could see the blue-strobe pulse of its TV. Sometimes there were shadows of movement between the insufficient blinds.
In shop class, in the seventh grade, we’d learned about tools. Which directions to move things, which machines had which tics, and which were most likely to tear off an arm. I used lines from Frost’s poem “Out, Out—” to write my term paper about the dangers of the portable router.
We had to learn first aid in shop class, too. Which was fine because I was already learning it in the Boy Scouts.
The noise was a thing. The theft and the running and bolting it to the counter had been things, too. They were terminal punctuation. They were our commitment to our Plan, because these things were the last steps we could take. The final preparations. Everything else was reversible—wouldn’t get us in trouble if Salvage turned out wrong. If everything quieted down, and we got jobs and suits and broke our promises to each other to live in the same town—to have wives who were friends and kids who asked us to teach them how to play Dungeons & Dragons.
But what we’d done—breaking into Meyer’s, leaving footprints, ruining the landlord’s counter—these were things we couldn’t take back. We had to wait until we were sure. We knew from the goateed guys at the Faire’s armory that sharpening carbon-steel swords on a bench grinder would ru
in the machine. It created harmonics that had nowhere to go but back into the machine’s bearings. And they would burn up, lock the wheels, and destroy the motor. And we knew that sharp edges were just ideas, that they fade over time, so that sharpening our swords too soon, while we were still practicing swordplay, would only mean we’d have to do it over again. That would mean two grinders, which we couldn’t afford, and didn’t want to steal. It would mean having mounted the grinder a lot sooner, when we still worried about the landlord coming around. It was impossible. If he came now, we didn’t care. We were ready.
We put soft edges on the swords, which were looser ideas about sharpness than what we intended. Than what we intended to do with these edges.
We took turns, grinding and grinding, throwing sparks onto the linoleum and against the fridge. The other of us paced from window to window, watching for notice. We had every light in the house on to make it look like we were working our late-night house-flipping renovation. They dimmed, a sort of sinking light-choir, every time one of us bore down on the wheels with our steel.
We only made them so sharp. Because we had to practice, which was going to dull them. After we’d practiced, then we’d finish the ideas. We’d sharpen them fully. And we got lucky—the grinder didn’t burn up, because we didn’t finish the job. We let it cool, and added some lubricant, which would be enough, we’d heard, to finish the job.
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