Everything was still in order in the 1890s living room. We’d stripped most of the kitchen, the study, the bedroom. Piled what we could of the plank flooring, stacked the loose bricks from the chimney. Round-edged, pink things that were stamped TEXAS. Like the ones in the lot behind the Strip. The ones to be repurposed. The lamented, vigiled bricks.
There was moonlight coming through the windows. Bubbled and creased, like looking through Coke bottles. The Virginia creeper outside the kitchen had grown even farther inside. It obscured the window almost entirely. In places, it had come up through the domino tile. Which we hadn’t bothered with. We didn’t see much use for tile.
The 1890s half of the house smelled like varnish and tobacco. It had that rich, old huff. Our half smelled like stale glue—and cigarettes, now. The landlord had been saying for two years that he would renovate this half. Rent it out. We didn’t want anyone else walking across the foundation, which we would feel on our side.
I turned around when Ruth stepped into the kitchen, an abyss of dark, unfloored pier-and-beam foundation between us.
Had the entrance to Hades been shored up like this? Planked and reinforced? I couldn’t remember. What did Orpheus think, walking into the dark? The smoke?
She looked around at the piles. “This is all yours?”
“Ours,” I said.
She wrinkled her nose. “Why does it smell like pumpkin?” She was standing next to the window, which looked out over the dark side of the house, where the creepers grew. Where Adam and I had practiced.
I shrugged. “Probably mown grass or something. From earlier.”
She tugged at the hem of her baby T-shirt, scrutinizing the place. I thought she looked a bit hard for that type of shirt. It was black, at least.
“Why do you have fertilizer?”
She edged around the hole in the floor, toward the creeper.
“Are you … we going to blow something up?”
I reached out. Gave her a hand around the hole. I didn’t want her stepping on the joists. I wasn’t sure they were still good.
I looked at the fertilizer. Our Place, where we were going, had already been tilled, used. Fallowed and reused. The fertilizer was for the garden there.
“If we need to.”
She stood next to me, looking back at the hollow floor. “How’d you get the fertilizer? Did you buy it?”
“We got it.”
“You won’t tell me?”
“What does it matter? We bought some things, we stole others. Some we found.”
She walked through, trailing a hand over the bricks, over the packets of bamboo seeds on top of the fertilizer. When we first moved in, the landlord sawed down all the bamboo in the backyard because its stalks spread like weeds. Later, the stumps were hard enough to puncture the wheels on his Jeep when he came back to work on the cross-ties shoring up the parking-lot gravel. We ordered the seeds right after. We’d let them weed all around our Place, to keep wheeled things out. We could use the stalks to fence the gardens. Down deep enough to fuck the prairie dogs and gophers.
She stopped in front of the old bathroom, looking at the dark mirror on the back wall. I’d meant to take the mirror down. To take it with us.
“You read the Book?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “I don’t want a new name.”
“You want to be Secondary,” I said.
“Yeah.”
I didn’t say anything. The tattoos on her arm were serpents. Dark mirror, dark hair, dark floor in the darkness. She was nothing like Mary. White Mary with a gun by the Strip.
“I can fix things. Make things.”
Bloody Mary.
“Can you weld?”
Bloody Mary.
“A little. Some. I can figure it out.”
Bloody Mary.
“All right.” I managed a smile. “Until we get there, we’ll just call you ‘Four.’”
She folded her arms. In the cold way, not the fuck off way.
“It’s better. That we call you something else,” I said. “You need to leave what you see with a different name.”
“Yeah, I get it.”
“You’ll still follow orders.”
“Yeah.”
Orpheus couldn’t look back.
I turned, looked back out the front window. I was done talking to her reflection.
“It says that a Place needs a name.”
He couldn’t look back, or he’d lose her.
“It has a name.”
She was quiet for a minute.
In the underworld, nothing ever died. It couldn’t. Things lasted forever. Dark places sucked things in: medicines and sports cards from the grocery store, mud, the violence in the parking lot, and the dark outside the Zodiac Arms. The what the fuck do we do next? Dark places didn’t spit them back out. Nothing came back from Charybdis. The just-a-mouth monster at the bottom of the whirlpool. An ongoing event as being.
Charybdis was a thing that carried meaning across miles and miles and miles. To the sailors in faraway places, through the waves that had the same potential, could be Charybdis anywhere. A Place anywhere.
Our Place was 327 miles away.
“What is it?” she asked.
The ancients even had flowers that lived forever. In the underworld. They thought of everything.
We had read another book. Native Americans, which I loved. The Zunis had the same, an immortal flower, continents away from the Greeks. The Zuni rain gods brought it back from the dark. From a different underworld. From different details.
“What is it, Hiram?” she asked.
I didn’t remember anything else about the Zunis. Which was fine. I had what I needed.
“It’s Amaranth.”
“Do you hear that?”
“Where’s it coming from?”
I listened. The sound carried easily up through the unfloored pier-and-beam.
“It’s from school.”
I got down on my knees, looked into the earthy dark, smelling dust.
“It’s the bell tower. It uses speakers. Recordings. Fake bells.”
I listened again. “Someone’s Placed the school.”
“What?”
Idiots.
Four pointed over my head, out the window. “Look.”
I got up and crept to the window. They were quieter than their own sounds. The sounds of engines and giant, humming tire treads on asphalt finally hit us. A pair of Humvees negotiated the automobile-bramble in the Sycamore intersection. One had a Browning .50-cal mounted on the top. A troop transport followed more sluggishly after.
I felt cold.
“Is that a Group?”
“No. Yes.”
Fuck.
“It’s the National Guard.”
“I thought—”
“Yeah.”
THE BOOK:
“TWO”
SEC. “I,” SUBSEC. “C,” PROCEDURE “I”
(“THE FIRST PHASE”)
(cont’d)
(v) They should take new names. (vi) They should carry upon them some Mark that identifies their alignment with the Party. (vii) Deliver this Mark in the presence of the rest of the Group, solemnly and with great respect. (viii) This cognitively ordains the Party to its task.
[4] (i) Further, Party Members (and Leaders specifically) should replace terms such as murder, kill, or injure with neutralize, remove, or incapacitate. (ii) The Leader should order early acts of violence, rather than leaving their analysis and execution to Party Members, which delivers the Leader from conscience-accountability with the knowledge that he or she did not personally harm a victim. (iii) The Party Member is delivered from such accountability with the knowledge that the voice of the Group directed his or her actions. (iv) The Group is everything. (v) The Party is simply an exploratory idea developing the Narrative. Party Members must be reminded of this often—they are not themselves when in Party.
[5] (i) Leaders and other Party Members must congratulate, thank, or oth
erwise affirm acts of violence committed by a Party Member in the interest of the operation. (ii) Party Members must be made to feel that their actions are appropriate to the Narrative. (iii) Party Members are encouraged to remember that those they must neutralize or incapacitate are Outsiders—direct opponents to Group survival. (iv) If Outsiders’ survival interests interfere with the Group’s, then, morally, these Outsiders are natural enemies—they are predators.
[6] (i) When in Party, look twice, move once. (ii) The obvious strategy is for a Leader to move his or her Party directly into a facility to Forage supplies, counting on martial strength to carry the Party through any necessary violence. This is an unnecessary expenditure of energy, as well as an unnecessary risk. (iii) Party excursions are conservative operations. (iv) Remember that, while it is unseen and generally unknowable, personal energy is a Group’s greatest resource. It must be replenished with food, water, and rest, all of which will be in precious supply. (v) As such, squandering energy with unnecessary maneuvers or unnecessary risk is a crime of waste, committed against the Group.
CHAPTER EIGHT
should I wake them up?” Four whispered.
“No.” I waved absently at the front wall, trying to set the black-and-white’s earpiece in place with my other hand. It was a leftover, a yellowed plastic thing that had come with the crystal radio kit my dad and I bought. We had built it together when I was twelve. The year I’d quit the Boy Scouts. It had been something we’d done together—he was one of the Assistant Scout Masters. They all were—one assistant for each Scout, fathers all, even if that made for a clumsy Administration. When I quit, he was commuting back and forth, from Dallas to Little Rock, because he’d lost his old job. Arkansas during the week, Texas on the weekends—when we did things like launch model rockets and build crystal radios. The Scouts had been ours, not mine, so I didn’t go because he couldn’t go. I went back when he did.
That was the first time we ceased to be a family.
The earpiece fit the black-and-white’s audio jack better than our other earphones.
“Just keep watch,” I told her.
The black-and-white’s dials were very small. Levi and I had to be careful with them because, over time, my dad had stripped many of the tiny, plastic teeth from the housing that cinched the dial onto the much-thinner tuning rod. We had to press and turn at the same time, or the dials would just spin.
My heartbeat was coming to a late realization about what Four and I had just seen. About what it meant. It started working itself up. I spun the dials a few times, ineffectually, forgetting to Depress the clutch, or you’ll kill it. I clenched my teeth to keep from cursing. Calmed down.
KHED was one of our favorite ’casts, even though he didn’t use video often. I didn’t want to hunt for anything new. As I turned the dial through the frequencies, I heard a lot of static. Several of the ’casts weren’t active anymore.
Salvage was thinning out.
I found KHED. It was a simple ’cast—just the digital newscasts, stripped out of their feed (video, too, this time) and re-’cast, analog, for Salvage. I wondered how many people, other than KHED, could even still see the original report. Without power. Who outside of Salvage would have any idea that things had escalated? To the point that KHED wasn’t fucking with the feed. To the point that no jammers were fucking with him not fucking with the feed.
I took my hands off the dials and grabbed the stenographer’s pad. Shoved the earpiece in deeper. I tried to be dutiful about this. The news anchor was trying to sound objective. The most important thing was keeping a clear perspective on the Collapse, though she didn’t call it that. They—digital, everyone else—didn’t have a name for it.
I took notes of images and feeds in case they showed up in somebody’s ’cast later. I didn’t know how much longer we’d be in Slade, but it would be better to know what Salvage was reusing, from where, just in case:
• Trouble at many major universities.
Clashes between law enforcement and National Guard personnel and anarchist demonstrators, who call themselves “Salvage.” Casualties on both sides. Law enforcement suffering from record numbers of MIA or AWOL personnel.
(video feed: burning university buildings, Humvees, Salvage weapons fire, law enforcement nerve-agent clouds.)
Our school was shown, briefly, in the unrest slideshow. Nothing was burning yet, and no one seemed to be firing, but there were Groups, or Parties (I couldn’t tell), on the campus, and they looked, in that brief moment, like they might be mobilizing. We’d already seen the fucking Humvees outside.
• Churches being burned, bombed, attacked by armed gangs.
(video feed: burning steeples, smoke-belching windows, stained glass glowing from the inside. People.)
I knew what this was about. The churches in the cities—the mosques and temples, the tabernacles and worship centers, the ones with ribbons of fleeing refugees like licking tongues streaming from the double doors to the streets outside—those would be gang attacks. The ones in the urban centers. Attacked from each corner, from streets with saints’ names.
But those streets were no longer divine. Their builders had offered them up, sacrificed Any Other Name, to be sure their cities paid tribute to God’s favorites. Now the streets were just lines, marking ganglands. There was nothing special about these churches. There were no secret histories or clandestine reliquaries. No one named pillars anymore, or stored sacred things in hollow places. Paid attention to divine blueprints, or built mysteries around their architects. These days, Solomon and David were an LLP—a firm downtown, perhaps, that had done civil buildings and art museums. One of the companies that designed churches, that also did movie theaters, schools, prisons. Because the schematics were the same, handed all the way down from the Second Temple: how to contain people according to God’s will.
Now they were just places to gather. Interchangeable. Forgettable. Flammable.
Any gang leader knew he had to get the jump if he was going to come out on top in all of this. Or stay on top. He had to carve out the new holy places. Thin them out. Place the holiest of holies somewhere in his territory.
The other churches, though—the empty ones, burning just the same—those would be Salvage attacks cutting out the risk before it could take root. Southern Salvage was terrified of churches. People would get scared, so they’d go to church. They’d eat church food, pray church prayers. Then they’d get hungry: a bunch of scared, well-armed southerners. In massive mobs. Not Groups. Who all believed they were right by God.
It wouldn’t take long, Chance had figured, before they’d start trying to spread the Good News at the ends of their rifles. Soon it would be God’s Will to survive, to be fruitful and multiply, and the Outsiders were threats. Nephilim. The Canaanites in the way. The mechanics of staying alive would rewrite the rules, and the South would be dotted with well-armed city-state theocracies. Military councils in Family Life Centers. Exercise on the old playgrounds. Procreation and Programming in the Nursery.
It would be a nightmare. I didn’t care much. With the National Guard and the police firing at them, though, Salvage was going to care less and less about making sure to go after only empty buildings and disabling facilities, resources, or threats in benign, nonviolent ways.
In a joint operation with the FBI, ATF agents in Georgia clashed with a terrorist organization called “Fat Chance” in a religious separatist compound near the city of Macon. The group was identified by the FBI as a key element in a nationwide epidemic of anti-State activity. Over fifty separatists are reported dead.
I stopped. Chance had never been in New York.
I looked at the reporting bitch who gave the news.
It was a diversion, I realized. Up the seaboard, because the rest of Salvage had become too interested in the Chance. In its whereabouts, maybe. It was smart. They weren’t taking any chances.
I looked at the note.
Terrorist organization.
Religious.
Compound.
I listened. They killed them. Killed Fat Chance and Slim Chance, Slow Moses, the Jeté. White. All of them.
Authorities traced the group through a federal fraud investigation. The group reportedly channeled funds and resources through unlicensed religious revival broadcasts, which they aired on a number of Citizens’ Television Band frequencies outside FCC regulation. The group, which relied upon CTB enthusiasts to help spread its messages, operated as “The Redemption Network,” raising over one million dollars for its cause. It was praised for its reactionary conservatism by a number of prominent conservative PACs and pro-values organizations.
But White had just started the story—“The Last Man”—with her last ’cast. How the hell would we get the rest of it? Crack its code?
If this was real—if Chance had laundered that money …
I made myself write another note.
As word first spread of confrontation with the Fat Chance terrorist organization, underground anarchists nationwide responded with demonstrations, attacks, and acts of civil disorder. Other religious separatist groups have reportedly launched attacks against domestic defense and law enforcement forces.
… then they took their … infantile steps criminally….
The Plan was supposed to be a reaction—not a catalyst, not a revolution.
I wanted to hit the news anchor. “Anarchist.” I wanted to hit her. She didn’t know what it meant.
… Pre-Event, take the time to learn the whereabouts of nearby paramilitary Groups, which may include religious or philosophical sects, racial supremacists, or other paralegal organizations. Avoid routes that will take your Group past these Places….
Chance’s ’casting campaign had been preemptive. Spreading the Good Word about the dangers of churches. In the South. Chance had mobilized the rest of Salvage—it got everyone to Clear its competitors. Tricked other Salvagers into avoiding the roads that would lead others to Chance’s Promised Land. Which was real, though: Chance or Redemption?
Had we been complicit? Or was this bullshit? Of course we weren’t our-fucking-selves when in Party. Not if we were fulfilling someone else’s Plan—Chance’s Plan—without fucking knowing it.
Noise Page 7
