Noise (3 page)

…
You are not yourselves….
, I said. Just walk right out and disappear into the grass.

The Plan was simple. We wouldn’t
steal
, which is paranoia—we would take, which was force. Things were falling apart faster than we expected.

We wouldn’t go inside the store. Inside was chaos. If there had
been more of us, maybe three, we would have. The disorder didn’t scare us—it was electric, new. Being someone else in a familiar place with new rules. Unpunishable rules. We figured that, inside, people would be shoving and running. Punching, stabbing, shooting for what they wanted. Or simply because
other
people wanted something. Not
what
but
because
. Because they could now. Those that survived, that fought their way out or slipped through the tidal surge from the bread aisle to the baby food, would already be tired, would already be hung over on their own adrenaline. They might be wounded, or out of ammunition, or unarmed.

We were mostly correct. So we crouched behind an overgrown holly bush and spotted. We were looking for targets, but it was already dark, and most of the store escapees were not pushing carts but sprinting with armloads. We wanted singles, and it was hard to tell who was running with who else. We didn’t want to fight. Especially not more than one person. That was the point.

From inside the maw of the entrance, from between what shards of glass still held to their frames, through flickers of flashlight and a shouting drone, things crashed. Banged. We heard a shot.

We had already drawn our swords.

“This isn’t working,” Levi said.

…
You are not yourselves…
.

“Can you see?” I asked mechanically, craning my neck, tugging at the shirt around my face. I had the same view as Levi.

“Yeah. No.”

“Maybe we should try the pharmacy,” I said.

Levi looked over his shoulder, peering through the curled holly leaves. “Same there.”

Every instant, more targets slipped by. More canned meat, batteries, isopropyl alcohol. More pockets filled with butane lighters.

My heart was still hammering. I was thinking in fragments, atemporal, simultaneous things.
Ghostbusters
, T-ball, staring at panty lines in lecture halls. I was sweating my clearest thoughts onto the leather wrapping the sword hilt. I was shutting up and thrumming forearms. I was my best friend. I was still afraid of being arrested.

“Tell me to do this.”

“What?”

“You have to fucking
tell
me to do this. I’m not doing it—you need me to do this. Say it.”

He wasn’t sure.

“Say it.”

He wasn’t sure.

“Don’t fucking
look at me
. Don’t. Fuck.”

…
You are not …

“Take one down.” …
yourselves
.

I was on the outside, farther from the bush than Levi.

“I need you to take one down.”

I didn’t even stand. I just swung the sword into a pair of running shins. Chips of things hit me in the face.

The problem with practicing on watermelons is that they don’t have bones, even if they do make the noise—a noise you don’t want to be surprised by.

I remembered T-ball. Team Yellow Jackets. Hitting a baseball with an aluminum bat stings. The ringing, in your ears, is not what you think it is.

This, of course, was not the Plan. The force of the running shins against the sword knocked me out of my crouch, away from the bush.

Adam shouted. It was his voice, and not Levi’s—I could tell.

But I couldn’t hear him over her screaming. Her face was right up against mine, after all.

“What?”

“What the
fuck?
” he whisper-shouted. He was looking around frantically, ducking and rising. He looked like he was preparing to steal something, which wasn’t the Plan. We came to
take
things.

Around us, between the cars in the parking lot, people kept running, kept dropping things and pulling at one another and looking back. The store was still making noise.

It sounded like traffic laws in the nearby intersection were losing force. Cars had become weapons, and some sounded stronger than others.

“Stop screaming,” I told her, dazed on my back. “Just … stop.”

Levi shuffled over.

“Christ, you didn’t even
ask
her,” he said.

I turned to look at her. She had stopped screaming, and her eyes were trying to look up, inside her forehead.

“Well, neither did you,” I said.

…
Do not panic…
.

“Jesus. Jesus.”

Jesus.

“What’s she got?” I managed to ask, sitting up. In the darkness, her blood looked like the oil oblonging the parking spaces.

Adam was touching her, tentatively, like she was a wounded animal. Something he intended to study, but not yet. Not while it could still spit and spray and blast adrenaline into his stream.

“Levi,” I said, …
best effected through …
not looking at her, “
what’s she got?
”

Thy shld tk nw nms
.

“Uh … uh”—he rummaged—“diapers, matches …”

…
disguise
.

I started gathering things and shoving them into my pack.

“Okay, look at me now.”

“What?”

“Now you can look at me.”

He stopped and looked. The folds around his eyes had cleared themselves of polish.

“I think … I think we need to always look. At each other. Afterward.”

He looked back down. “Okay.”

When we’d sold candy, to raise money for cleats and flags and dues to the YMCA, I had practiced in the mirror.

“Hello.”

Morally …

“I’m selling candy to raise

…
these Outsiders …

“money for my T-ball team, the Yellow Jackets.

…are natural enemies
.

“Would you like to buy something?”

…
They are predators
.

In the end, though, you bought all the candy yourself. Or your parents did. You took what you needed to fulfill the team’s need. You paid.

•   •   •

The girl was a brunette, or red-haired. The shock had gotten her. She was still breathing, but her eyes were closed now.

I stood up and leveled the point of my sword at her throat.

“We don’t want to hurt you,” I practiced.

I couldn’t remember what to say next. What we had agreed to. People ran around me, hammering the oily pavement in the shoes they’d thought best for sprinting through the End of All Things.

Levi stood up, sword down. Playing Bad Cop.

“But we need what you have,” he said.

I looked at him, waited until he looked back. “You can give it to us.”

“Or we can take it.”

“Do another one,” I told him. “I need you to do another one.”

He looked around, crouching by reflex. An insect poked mid-thorax. “Wait, are other people … is anyone else killing?”

“We don’t want to kill anyone,” I said. “Remember?”

We stacked our cards. Cross-legged in sweatpants. A Saturday afternoon at Jon’s house. We traded what our parents had bought for us and checked values in our price guide, hoping to sneak bad deals past each other.

We took our turns at bat, wincing before we even reached the T. Afraid of it, of contact. It always hurt to connect the aluminum bat with the ball, and we couldn’t hear our dads through our regulation safety helmets. They were usually too big, but they still pinched the cartilage in your ears. Things still hurt when you kept
your eye on the ball
, and did someone say
good hustle?
You couldn’t be sure, standing before the T.

This would hurt, so you couldn’t
be yourself
. You couldn’t
most importantly, have fun
. You were not yourself in your T-ball disguise. You were a Yellow Jacket.

There is no I in team
.

The ringing in your ears is not what you think it is.

“TWO”

(cont’d)

[3] (i) If, conversely, your Place is situated far from any urban center, is relatively inaccessible, and has available resources, prepare as much as possible as far in advance as possible.

I.

“PLAN”

[1] (i) You will need a Plan. (ii) This Plan must include a Place, a Group, and an Event Exit Strategy.

I.A.

“PLACE”

[1] (i) The principles behind selecting a Place are simple. (ii) It should be remote yet not excessively so—later, Trade, exploration, and recruitment will become vital. (iii) Your Place should offer security. (iv) That is to say that while it may not be equipped
ab initio
with ramparts, palisades, or the like, it must at least offer a high degree of visibility of the surrounding territory. (v) In the event that you attempt too late to secure a Place and the available locations offer neither fortification nor visibility, then you must settle for something discreet, preferably a cave or other such enclosure. (vi) In the unfortunate situation that, post-Event, you have neither a Group nor a satisfactory Place, you must immediately gather the necessary resources and equipment to sustain and defend yourself. (vii) If you
possess a skill set that would make you a worthwhile Addition to a Group, such as small electronics or generator repair, husbandry, medical training, or engineering, then you need only concern yourself with sustenance and defense. (viii) If, however, you lack a skill set with which to Trade yourself to a Group, then you must hoard, secure, and transport items of worth, including medical supplies, ammunition, or essential knowledge.

[2] (i) Your Place will require a name. (ii) With the other territorial, cultural, and discursive landmarks of your old “self” dislocated, Foraged, or destroyed, you must very quickly project yourself into your new Place, which, for a time, will be all Places. (iii) A Place is a form of extended consciousness, in that it delimits and defines perception. (iv) Motivated perception, in turn, delimits the construction of your world.

w
hen we first found out about Salvage, skipping class in the coffee shop, we became obsessed. We stopped playing Dungeons & Dragons. We became like soldiers, disciplining each other: class, homework, work, Salvage. We took notes, indexed broadcasters and jammers, and followed directions. We asked around town, over and over until, finally, someone sold us a crib sheet for two hundred dollars. A dictionary of stencils and graffiti, for what was being written into Slade. We studied it, tested each other. We began compiling our version of the
Book
, which was the manual. Holy Writ. The collected Salvage manifesto, assembled from the snippets and fragments and bits of useful information buried beneath all the broadcast noise. Everyone had a different version, which was good. If we all followed the same framework, we’d end up competing.

We dropped classes to lighten our homework. We couldn’t drop out altogether. We were taking financial aid, and without it, we’d have to work too much. We wouldn’t have time for the
Book
.

We bought books secondhand, so there would be no record of purchase. Things like
FM 21–76, Department of the Army Field
Manual: Survival, The Anarchist Cookbook, The Survival Bible
. I still had copies of
The Official Boy Scout Handbook
and
Unintended Consequences
. It had been five years since I earned my Eagle Scout Award. I was the youngest in the troop to ever do so.

We weren’t far from the house, a duplex with only one livable half. We lived in the annex, tacked onto the old place in the 1950s, but we stockpiled things in the old half, the 1890 half: some books, a picture of Thoreau, a fifty-pound bag of salt we’d taken from L. D. Pizza, where we were delivery drivers.

We only had to make one turn, then onto Broadway Avenue, the civil artery that wormed past the road to the university on one side and to the square on the other. But we had to shoot one car to make it. One of the people we stacked in the parking lot, before we moved to the pharmacy, had been carrying a snub-nosed .38. Unloaded. Ammunition in its pockets.

People were driving in whatever direction they wanted, particularly college guys in lifted pickups and sports cars. They were smashing what they could reach with aluminum bats, standing upright through the T-tops of their Camaros or kneeling on the wheel wells in the beds of their buddies’ pickups. People were stopping and swerving and smashing things.

We had an open lane—only needed to go ten blocks—but someone was scared in front of us. Weaving between lanes, avoiding bottles, hoping to be ignored. There weren’t other immediate threats around us then, but we couldn’t take the chance. A lot could happen in ten blocks.

I pulled the .38 from my pack, loaded it, and rolled down my window. I looked at Levi and waited.

He watched the road, waiting. Eventually, he turned and stared at me.

“Remove it,” he said.

I nodded. Refixed my mask. I fired one shot at the old Buick in front of us, which was nearly driving on the median, trying to avoid abandoned cars in the other lane.

For such a small gun, the explosion made my ears ring. My head rushed with blood, and the recoil jammed my elbow against the window frame. I wasn’t ready for it.

The Buick’s rear window iced over instantly. Clouded, webbed, a tiny hurricane eye just off center. The driver moved fully onto the median, rocking the car, and veered onto the correct side of the road. We’d been driving on the wrong one.

One of our early exercises had been the erection of a training dummy. We used scrap wood and parachute cord and a set of pulleys we got from the Army/Navy Surplus Store next to Meyer’s. We’d take turns, puppeting the dummy for each other. We’d swing it in all different directions, at different heights, between the giant sycamores in our front yard. Twenty feet away, cars raced down the road. We lived directly off Broadway, our yard elevated some ten or twelve feet. We could hear the bell tower on campus; we could see the spire on the old courthouse downtown.