The generators in the Hoover Dam have been compromised, as a part of this increasing wave of domestic terrorist attacks. Large portions of the southwestern US are now without power.
We’d be just as clueless as all these Outsiders, Books or not.
I pulled the earpiece out. Four turned and looked at me.
“Any more Guard?” I asked.
“No.”
“Wake them up.” I handed her the stenographer’s pad. “Give Levi the report. Do it calmly. Don’t wake them in a panic.”
“Where are you going?”
“Just outside. A check.”
I picked up one of the walkie-talkies and the .38. I was careful, slipping out the back door. Anyone could be waiting among the palisades of bamboo obscuring the fence. I moved slowly, across the gravel lot, through the stalks, toward the fence. We taught ourselves ninjutsu and tried it out in the fort. In the field between us and the grocery store. Against the fence, I could hear the bell tower better, but I still couldn’t tell what they were saying.
They’d taken the campus for White. For Fat Chance.
I tuned the walkie-talkie to Channel 19. The Salvage Channel. The most popular, anyway. What came through matched the mumbled bell tower broadcast in cadence. Someone was standing close enough to pick up what was coming from those hidden speakers. Close enough to give it to the rest of Slade. ’Casters would piggyback it. Take it from their own walkie-talkies, and pump it straight into their amps, into their modded antennae. Word would spread.
I listened.
Last made his goggles with cobalt-blue Depression bottles. He filed the shattered bases smooth and secured them over his ears with wire. He printed a trowel inside the shanty—
It was White’s voice, cut off. Probably the last portion to make it out of New York. Out of Georgia. Chance must’ve been real. It had to be.
Somebody local had gotten the last portion. Whoever it was, they weren’t ’casting the story like they were supposed to. They were asserting it. Moving it from the Salvage airwaves to something physical. Speaking into a microphone atop the bell tower, or jacking a portable data player into whatever mixing deck controlled the volume, the pitch, the timbre of the school’s artificial bells. Whoever this was, they were creating an oracle. A call to prayer. You had to come out of the dark places, out of Salvage-hiding to listen to the rest of the story.
And they’d been cut off. I didn’t hear any weapons fire. Even at this distance, I’d hear it if they’d shelled the tower.
A sniper, though, could have done it quietly. Silenced the speakers, severed the nerve thinking the mob.
Except, if I was right—if those were Cells or Groups on campus—there wasn’t a nerve to sever. Just Phantom Cell Structure. It wasn’t a mob. It was the confluence of different Places, all thinking across their distances. Shooting one kid in a tower or destroying the device playing the story into the speakers wouldn’t demoralize the Salvage on campus. It would light it on fire. It would make the campus into all Places at once. It would make it a terrain that looked different, looked safe in different ways to everyone with something to throw or shoot at the Guard.
… When you reach your Place, consider it enemy territory….
Now was our chance. The government had accelerated things. It wasn’t supposed to be this unstable for weeks. The country was starting to burn. I’d guess the whole world was starting to burn.
Now was our chance. We needed to get the jump. We were going to need more than just the four of us. To be strong.
We needed the rest of White’s story.
“Because we need the rest of the story,” I said. “We need some fucking answers.”
Four was being calm. I’d told Levi and Mary about Four. She was asking sound questions, which was good. We hadn’t assigned a Party Leader yet, so asking questions was still good.
“You don’t understand,” Levi said.
“White’s story, ‘The Last Man,’ is going to be a part of Salvage.”
“Whatever it’ll be like now,” Mary said.
I looked at her. “Yeah.”
“We’re going to need the rest of that story,” I said. “It’ll be a stock in trade. It’ll be a thing between Salvagers.”
“Do you even know what it means?”
“It’s just a story,” I said.
“It’s a story about survival,” Levi said. “It’s a metaphor. A code.”
“Like the crib sheets?”
“Yes.”
“It’s not just about ‘survival,’” Mary said. “It’s about ‘self,’ too.” She tied her bandanna over her head. It would be under her mask.
“‘The Last Man,’” Four said. “It’s a religion. You’re chasing after your own grail.”
I smirked. She didn’t get it. “It isn’t a religion.”
“It’s about a Group with one brain, from a Group with one brain. One brain to rule them all,” she said.
She didn’t get it.
Mary reached for the polish, for her face. Levi stayed her hand. There wasn’t a Party yet. No Leader meant no paint.
“No one believes in the Last Man,” I said. “He doesn’t get you anything. No heavens, no blessings, no bread from the sky. It’s just a story.”
“About being last,” Levi said.
“That’s what a religion is,” Four said. She took the can of polish from Levi. “The perfect, final, static self. I read the Book. I get it. It’s fine. We’re going after the new religion. That’s fine. We’re going after some others, who don’t know yet what they’re going after. After some answers.”
I looked at her. She was ready to paint Mary white. She was holding the can so she could paint Mary with her other hand.
“That’s fine,” Four said. “We should all go. This is important.”
“I think Hiram should Lead the Party,” Four said.
“You Lead, Hiram?” Levi asked.
They all looked at me.
… You are not yourselves….
She doesn’t get it.
“I’ll Lead.”
Ruth started painting Mary. “I need a mask.”
Levi and I exchanged looks.
“I thought you wanted to be Secondary.”
“Yes.”
“You want in on this?” I asked. “You want a mask?”
She closed Mary’s eyelids, gently. “I have to have something.”
THE BOOK:
“TWO”
SEC. “I,” SUBSEC. “C,” PROCEDURE
“I” (“THE FIRST PHASE”)
(cont’d)
[7] (i) It is better for the Party to use the energy of others to its advantage. (ii) The key to the First Phase of the Event Exit Strategy is to execute the maneuver before too much time passes. (iii) In the early period following the Event, when civil unrest outpaces law enforcement, great numbers of urban Outsiders will flock to places such as grocery stores, pharmacies, feed suppliers, and hardware stores. (iv) Some will waste their energy at electronics stores and other commodity suppliers. Avoid these facilities.
[8] (i) The Party is watching for disorder. (ii) The most conservative Forage occurs outside facilities wherein chaos reigns. The reason behind this is that the situation offers the greatest capitalization on the personal energies of others. (iii) Those that do successfully negotiate internal facility disorder will have expended great amounts of personal energy in doing so (indeed, they may already have sustained injuries), which makes them ideal targets.
[9] (i) The maneuver does not begin until you have established surveillance. (ii) The surveillance officer’s primary duty is to watch for signs of risk—approaching mobs, rogue military patrols, or competing Parties endanger your Party, necessitating abortion and reassignment.
[10] (i) In the theater of violence itself is the acquisitions team. (ii) Ideally, they are three. (iii) If your Party has only three Members, then the surveillance operation must necessarily be rolled into their tasks. (iv) Under these circumstances, the to
lerance for risk is higher, for the Party must acquire the supplies it needs, risk or not.
[11] (i) The most conservative form of the maneuver involves three roles for the acquisitions team: diplomat, mule, and escort. (ii) The diplomat approaches Outsiders as they exit the facility, having successfully negotiated the disorder inside. (iii) The diplomat requests the supplies in question from the target. (iv) If the target declines, the diplomat threatens force. (v) If the target reciprocates, the three incapacitate the target and Forage the supplies. (vi) The mule moves the Foraged goods out of the immediate theater and into a nearby cache. (vii) The escort monitors surrounding activity and will defend the mule and his or her payload, should either come to risk. (viii) The Party must remember that its behavior is not its own. (ix) You are not yourselves. (x) The Place is thinking, and it requires vicious behavior.
[12] (i) Repeat this process until it becomes infeasible.
CHAPTER NINE
i wasn’t Senior Patrol Leader then. I think I might have been Assistant Patrol Leader. I might have just been in a patrol. I can’t remember.
We were lost. Doing our duty to God and our country. Remembering the Boy Scout Law. Being Prepared. But we were on the wrong trail. Our dads had gone ahead, driving the pickup trucks and vans and SUVs to the campsite off the state park road. They had set up their camp, percolated coffee over the fire in blue-enameled steel pots. Sat in camp chairs in Boy Scout cargo shorts. They wore their socks up to their shins. It was regulation. They were setting good examples.
There were twenty-three of us, and we each carried a compass. There was only one map, however. One SPL, two Assistant SPLs, four Patrol Leaders, four Assistant Patrol Leaders. I was one of these, somewhere in the ranks, one of the youngest in the troop. I’d been allowed in early because of my Arrow of Light. Earning the Arrow of Light, in the Webelos, got you in early. Got you the training earlier than others.
We had aluminum-frame packs, hiking boots, Sierra cups on our belts. Pocketknives, waterproof matches, flashlights with belt clips and buttons for signaling in Morse code. We had all these things lost with us, standing in a mob on the hiking trail. We were earning our Orienteering Merit Badges, arguing directions beneath black oaks. Among creepers and ferns and tiny signs identifying other plants.
The SPL’s name was an anagram. All things were anagrams, some without vowels. I’d learned this from the back-page puzzles in Boys’ Life magazine. A subscription came with your dues to the troop, and it told stories of loyalty, Christianity, and service. The magazines featured pictures of concept cars and kits for turning vacuums into hovercrafts. There were ads for throwing-knife targets, for air rifles, for gun camps. There were articles on how to make bridges out of rope.
I didn’t speak into the mob. Into the noise. Everyone else was older than me. We were tired. We were lost. One of the boys was crying. I couldn’t do orienteering. Not well. I could do fires. I won awards for starting fires with wet wood, for starting them at competitions in artificial winds blown from rented industrial fans.
I stuck with what I knew. I learned how to make all kinds of fires all kinds of ways. To do my duty to God and my Country.
We were walking to the square. That was something. I didn’t want to chance the Mulberry Mob again, though they’d likely dispersed when the Guard rolled through. Those that Mary hadn’t burned. The Oak Street intersection wasn’t much farther down Broadway. We stayed away from the road, moving when we could through office buildings and parking garages. I didn’t want to chance the truck, or the car. There was too high a chance that we wouldn’t have open roads. We’d be an obvious target, and if we hit a roadblock, we didn’t have the artillery to get ourselves out.
Four had helped Levi rig some more cocktails, with motor oil and gas from a can that we used to fill the lawn mower. We carried two each, on lariats I’d tied for the purpose. Four carried six. She would replace what we used. I assigned the .38 to Mary because she couldn’t use a sword.
Later, when I was SPL, when everyone was younger than me, after the troop’s first Eagle Scout had gone to prison, after the second had joined the police force, I told them that we weren’t lost. There wasn’t any discussion. I allowed only Patrol Leaders to carry compasses. Everyone had jobs. Orient, read. Carry the matches. Be important to the troop. We need you to do this. I had my Assistant SPLs run checks, talk with Patrol Leaders about fatigue, morale, backaches. I called stops for rest before the others had to ask. They voted me into the Order of the Arrow for this, and I spent a weekend without talking, among other Order initiates, sleeping on the ground without a tent. I kept the secrets from the rest of the troop. Like I was supposed to. When someone cried, I put him in charge of something. Made him responsible to something other than being twelve years old and tired. Made him somebody. Promised him I’d show him how to make fire. I’d call him Prometheus, like calling him “Sport.” I’d learned it at his age, reading Mythology. They didn’t know what it meant, but they liked taking a new name.
On Oak Street, we moved in Z-file, staggered. Mary followed me, Four followed her. Levi walked last. Without streetlights, without flashlights and campfires, we could see the stars. The blurry band of the Milky Way. On Scout campouts, we couldn’t even see any constellations—they were too polluted by their own stars, and our dads had to bend the rules to get us our Astronomy Merit Badges, out west at summer camp.
Even Mary, in her white, was hard to see in the dark when I turned around. I led them straight down the center of the road, between parked and abandoned cars. I wouldn’t take them right up against the historic homes that lined the street because I didn’t want to alarm anyone. I didn’t want to give anyone a reason to think we had come for their things.
At one house, we heard people talking in the side yard, behind a fence. Male voices.
… Take no chances….
I stopped us. Pulled us into a crouching cluster in the middle of the road.
“Mary,” I ordered. “Cocktail.”
I couldn’t let this bunch, talking into the dark, get the jump on us.
She pulled loose a cocktail and set it on the asphalt. Four handed her another to fill the empty lariat.
“Light it,” I told Four.
She did, hiding the mostly blue flame with her cupped hands.
“Levi,” Prometheus, “divert their attention.”
I looked at Mary. Grabbed her shoulder. “You and Four, thirty yards ahead. Get the jump.”
She grabbed Four, and they took off, sprinting low and quiet. Practicing ninjutsu without the tall grass. You were supposed to run like your hands were holding rails.
I stood up with Levi, and he threw the cocktail.
• • •
On my twenty-first birthday, Adam and I went bar-hopping around the Strip. On the way home, down Oak Street, with its better sidewalks than Mulberry, I bummed cigarette after cigarette from Adam. I’d been smoking them with him that night, which was something new to do—together—since returning from the West. From the university in Lubbock, that first year. From weekend visits to my cousin’s farm.
Later, I convinced him to quit.
The Strip-rat was not in the street anymore. When I looked at the Wailing Wall, I was tired. It showed something that couldn’t have been real, so I looked away. It was dark.
It couldn’t have been real.
I didn’t look back, in case it was.
Around two corners, a few blocks away, someone was shouting into a bullhorn. They’d be on Meyer Street, which once contained the fronts of the Strip, before the renovation began. Nearby, there’d be the three-story Auditorium Building at the edge of campus. One of many massive buildings with cement walls behind brick walls between wet walls. We took our literature classes there, listening to musicians practice on the massive, one-of-a-kind organ in the heart of the building. In the auditorium that was no longer used.
We’d scoped the building before. If you boarded up the glass windows, it’d be impenetrable. The Guard
wouldn’t be able to take it except by siege if Salvage had holed up inside. There would be massive casualties on both sides, particularly for the invaders.
The building had a basement, with a crawl space. You could use it to gain access to the municipal sewer line under Meyer. We had the specs.
“In the event of a separation,” I said to the Party, “rendezvous in the Oak Street Building. In the courtyard.”
I took ceramics classes in the Oak Street Building. It was behind us, over our shoulders really, a satellite just off the main campus.
They nodded.
“If you wait there, alone, for over an hour, fall back to the HOC.”
Gunfire erupted. I heard the pneumatic grunts of nerve-agent cannons. It would be mild stuff, with a narrow radius.
That thing, on the Wall, couldn’t have been real. There was nothing wrong with us. With the Book.
The storefront windows went all at once, concussed from their frames. Books fell off the shelves easily. Between semesters, the university bookstore didn’t keep as many, so the shelves were lightly packed. You only had so long to sell your texts back before the next semester. They sent them back and then bought them again. Over and over, emptying and filling shelves. It wasn’t owned by the university, but you had to buy your books there.
We learned that “Used Saves.”
The Party was fine, in the middle of the store, against one wall. I checked.
There’d been a kid with a gun standing by the front window. The Meyer Street window. Now he had glass in his face. In his eyes. There was a piece lodged in his throat, an alien flap silencing his screams. He was horribly alive.
I took his .30-caliber Beretta, the ammo. A crib sheet from his back pocket. He had a hypodermic needle. If he was Salvage, on recon, or a recruiter, maybe, it was his ticket out. The chemical stylus that would shear the layers of his brain, wiping him out and the intel he had with him.
I shoved it in his neck and depressed the plunger. Because in the Boy Scouts, you take an oath to “Help other people at all times.”
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