Noise (16 page)

I.

[1] (i) You will require Special Days and Monuments. Both strengthen your Narrative.

I.A.

“SPECIAL DAYS”

[1] (i) Your first Special Day should be “Arrival Day”—an after-the-fact remembrance of your Arrival—and it should be a Day of Rest. This is a Day for telling and retelling Narratives of the Evacuation and Arrival. This is a Day of celebration. (ii) Watch rotation is not a violation of the terms of rest.

[2] (i) If you have fermented drink, tobacco, or esoteric herbs and chemicals among your supplies, offer these for use upon Arrival Day. (ii) Secondary Members with musical skill, storycraft, or other Expressions-of-Society abilities should contribute these to Society on Arrival Day (and other Days to follow), thus graduating into Primary Membership. (iii) From this point forward, it will be part of their contributions to arrange new material that is a specific expression of Place-culture instead of recycling Old Trade expressions.

[3] (i) Do not restrict the content of Place-expression, even when it seems to threaten prosperity. It is necessary that Members express their frustrations and losses. Doing so, in fact, strengthens prosperity, contrary to what you may think. (ii) Censorship initiates Collapse and Failure, at any stage in a Place’s history.

l
istening to the walkie-talkie, I heard phantasmal half conversations between Groups, on the way back to the HOC. We had the Jacks’ gear. We were situated.

There was more static than normal, and it sang between transmissions. Everyone sounded distant. A few of the clearer voices were running amplifiers, which made them sound electric. It gave them more range, the first word on the waves across the ocean—the first draw that would suck at distant ships, the Charybdis in charge of everyone’s directions, even if no one knew. Even if everyone thought he had dead-reckoned his own course. Even if it would take a thousand miles to get sucked between a rock and a hard place.

I thought about tin-can voices, playing telephone in grade school with a line of twine. Mostly what you heard was your own voice, sounding hollow. Foreign. You were someone else when you spoke into the can, and it was nice to hear your own voice, like staring at that mirror, sounding distance in the dark, making noise. Wondering if Bloody Mary would ever show up.

•   •   •

When I was young, when we were still a family, I heard those amped CB voices out in the dark. Out west, where there were no lights on the highways, and you could see every star while your sisters slept on the bench, in the van, beside you. A road trip. Family vacation. Your mother’s head nodding, knowingly, as she dozed with the highway next to your father.

Back then, I read only fantasy novels and books about space. NASA technical manuals describing the space shuttle, its SRBs, pitch and yaw, and reentry. I planned on joining the air force, to pilot shuttles. Out there in space, where there was no one.

But in the dark, in the van, I didn’t read. I looked at those too-many stars, winking darkly through the tinted glass, and I breathed deeply when clouds of dark smoke from my father’s pipe moved over me. It was dusty, out west, and you could see devils twirling when truckers’ lights painted them, out there among the brush. My father drove, the spill of the headlights the only measure against unseen holes in the earth. We listened to old recordings of Hank Williams, and Willie Nelson, and Randy Travis, because that was what he liked. Songs for Orpheus on his way down, into the Texas darkness, through the tobacco smoke, and over the holes in the earth. He explained to me then why some of the voices on his CB—which he kept on, even when we didn’t need it—sounded so strange. He told me about the amps, about how they broke FCC regulations. Between songs, I would listen to those voices, to that language I didn’t know yet.

I was little then. I didn’t know better.

Levi’s voice cut through the halftones and static. “Copy, Party, this is HOC. Go ahead.”

“Target acquired,” I said. “Over.”

“Copy, Party. Did you sustain casualties?”

Yes
.

“Affirmative.”

He was quiet for a minute. I listened to the ghosts on the waves talking about Dallas. They were explaining, in their one-sided conversations, that it was to blame for the glow to the southeast. They were still driving their trucker rigs. Still shipping bullshit nowhere, across state lines, to sell to no one.

“Copy. The rest of the stations have gone. The Northern Lights are over.”

“Copy,” I said, watching the truck’s headlights paint glowing road onto the band of darkness in front of us.

“What’s your ETA?”

On Scripture Street, I saw one uniformed cop, his massive, flashlight-cum-club waving—a torch in the darkness. There were others with him, marching, in civilian clothes. They moved up a sidewalk, toward someone’s front porch. There were other flashlights glowing, on other porches, all the way down the block.

“Ten minutes.”

“Copy, Party. You are not cleared for deviation. I don’t want any spontaneous recon. Do you copy?”

“Copy, HOC.”

“Salvage has started Clearing. We’re going to have to wait.”

“Copy. See you in ten.”

“Copy.”

“Levi?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m all right.”

The static washed, like waves ashore, between us. One wave carried all the way from across the sea. From the Charybdis we couldn’t see coming, sailing so far away.

•   •   •

We left Zero and Silo on watch once we got back. It was getting late, and we’d need to start a rotation soon. But not yet. Matthew and Mark stowed the new gear while Merlin and Voice took inventory. Everyone needed something to do. I made each responsible for something.
Only Patrol Leaders could carry compasses. I needed them all to be important to the troop
.

Inside, there were candles. The black-and-white offered only static light. The digital, of course, had no power. I handed Circe off to Penelope, and she went willingly. She had nothing-distances to stare, to orient herself in the darkness, to think about who’d died, and how. Penelope was sounding things back to her, even if Circe wasn’t sounding them herself.

Levi, Mary, Four, and I gathered in the kitchen. An ashtray between us on the table. We all smoked.

“When are we getting out of here?” Four asked.

“The Lull’s no good anymore,” Levi said. “Penelope watched a cluster of backpacked undergrads heading down Broadway, toward Thirty-five.”

“What does that mean?” Mary asked. We could hear Penelope speaking softly in the other room. I could hear her humming.

Levi looked at Mary. “First of all, what you all did was right.”

He had no idea, not yet.

I looked down at the table, but that was a mistake, too. I looked back up, to take a drag of that awful cigarette. Four was staring at me, her expression soft as she read the lines of my face.

“But to answer your question, it was an exodus. Dorm kids, I’d guess. They didn’t make it far, open like that during the Lull.”

“How far?” Mary asked.

“The cemetery.”

“So we’ll wait out the second wave,” I said. “We’ve got a lot more firepower than we’d planned on.”

“We could use it now. To get out,” Mary said.

“Yes,” Four said.

“Waste of ammunition,” I said. “The trucks would take unnecessary damage. The Jacks’ chemicals could make a fifty-foot crater in all directions if they took fire.”

“What about Circe?” Mary asked. “The
Book
doesn’t have any Narrative for her. For this.”

“I know,” I said.

I looked at them. At Mary, their White Mary who could lay her hands on anything. Make anything make sense. And Four, with those serpents, with her darkness, the small voice in the bookstore office, who had calmed Circe, when she had been only Morgan, waiting for her boyfriend while the Guard shelled the living fuck out of the bookstore and the Auditorium Building. Who had calmed her again, arms around Circe’s shoulders, by yanking her out of the high school hallway. Who had been there with hands after Luke had gone. Becoming Carson again, in those last important moments.

If we weren’t careful, “Circe” might not take. If one went, they all might, here in the House of Cards. She needed to be shown what was right.

I needed the Jacks.
We
needed them. I had to think about Amaranth. About what we’d need if we had to Forage the nearby farms. If we needed to destroy access roads and overpasses. I didn’t know how to cook anything, and neither did Levi.

I scooted out of my chair and ducked into my bedroom. Fluff and Edmund were on the bed, staring with big eyes. Watching things in the darkness that we couldn’t even see. I had an old cigar box on my desk, filled with vials of essential oils. It was
from my time as a shaman. I’d sketched an eagle’s head onto the box’s surface with a black marker.

I stepped back into the kitchen and slid the box onto the table. “You’re going to clean her up.”

Levi stared at the box. “Right. The tub—you two and Penelope. Bathe her. Or something.”

“A baptism,” Mary said.

Four rubbed her head. “We can’t let her go, even if she wants to.”

“There isn’t anywhere
to
go,” Levi said. “Amaranth is all Places now.”

Mary lifted the lid on the box. “And these?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Rub her down with them, or something. It’ll look like you know what you’re doing.”

“Maintain the illusion of control.”

They looked at me then.

From up on the roof, I could see most things. The Jacks were inside, having something to eat, while Mary and Four and Penelope worked on Circe. There were still a few beers in the fridge, so Levi parceled them out. He got them started sharing toasts and telling stories. About the school, about themselves, while I kept watch with the binocs. They poured some on the floor, a little bit, every time they toasted.

The pitch of the roof was steep, and I didn’t trust the masonry on the old fireplace, so I kept myself in place by holding on to the PVC bathroom vent. One of the women, Four maybe, was singing, down there, below, in the waters. Like something from some Old Country. A
rusalka
, maybe. A tune for the divining pond that could get you underground, where all magic occurred.

I was glad the gas line was still working, because otherwise it would have been a damn cold bath without the water heater.

I could see charred rooflines downtown. The courthouse itself looked like it had been firebombed—the dome at its top, at least. If there was still a Group there, they were staying put. I guessed they went underground, into the service tunnels and storm drains. Salvage had maps for those, which were easy to get. Levi and I had even had a look around ourselves. Before. Dozens of taggers had marked those tunnels. Staking claim. Bullshit like that.

In the other direction, over the backyard, across the bam-booed Humvee and the tarped trucks—beyond the apartment building on the other side of the sycamore trees at the edge of the property line, behind Mary’s building—I could see a few dormer windows in the mansions along Greek Row. Where the frats were. They were idiots for burning lights upstairs like that, but those buildings were almost impenetrable. And they had more Members than we did. There were more of them who needed to find their way through the darkness and all of the smoke. More worming their ways through the holes in the earth, so maybe it made sense. To beckon.

I could see a bit of the Dallas glow. Not the buildings or the fires themselves—the roof wasn’t high enough for that. Elsewhere, in Slade, the Salvage Clearing burned. Clusters of houses and strip malls and unfinished developments were going up as planned. Flushing Outsiders from one place to another—eventually, to be shooed out of Slade altogether. The fires made pillars of smoke that I could only see as black-on-black distortion. Darkness inside against darkness out. But the fires, themselves, like glowing flowers in the darkness—things that couldn’t die—those came from the underworld. Amaranths, all of them, as they shone behind tree lines.

Levi made his way up to me. Circe was finally crying down the pipe. I assumed. I could hear something electric buzzing.

“What the hell is that noise?” I asked.

“Tattoo gun. Penelope had it—one of those rigs made from ballpoint pens and a tape deck motor. I think it uses a compass for a needle. You know, like, from geometry classes.”

“How the hell is she powering it?”

“Car battery.”

“Jesus. What are they tattooing?”

He shrugged. “I need to Hear what happened.”

Yeah.

A review. Just in case. Party Leadership wasn’t a permanent assignment, and it needed to be reviewed, for future consideration.

But I could only footnote it for him, because minute-by-minute, the more I thought about the operation, the more sense it was making, the more
right
it was becoming.

“
Two,” Section “I,” Subsection “c,” “Procedure I.,” “The First Phase,” Paragraph 1, Item iii
.

“And at which point did you lose control?” he asked.

“
Two,” Section “I,” Subsection “c,” “Procedure I.,” “The First Phase,” Paragraph 4, Item ii
.

“How did the other Jacks take it?”

“
Two,” Section “I,” Subsection “c,” “Procedure I.,” “The Second Phase,” Paragraph 9
.

“What about Mary and Four?”

“
Two,” Section “I,” Subsection “c,” “Event Exit Strategy,” Paragraph 7, Item viii
.

He looked at me then, because we were supposed to always look. “And what about you?”

“Well—” “
Two,” Section “I,” Subsection “c,” “Event Exit Strategy,” Paragraph 7, Item iii
.

“Good, then,” he said.

He watched the flowers with me for a time, an arm around my shoulder to steady himself.

“I’ve seen the Jacks’ inventory,” he said. “The gains outweigh the losses. The operation was a success.”

Some blocks away, people were throwing cocktails at one another. It was beautiful. When car tires screeched, at this distance, it sounded like the hoot of the train that moved through town, late at night, just beyond the city limits. It was a sound I liked.