Noise by Darin Bradley Page A

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 chemicalstylus 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.”
    If it was morphine, or something like, he’d die shitfaced and weightless.
    Be prepared
, our fathers had taught us.
    Outside, in the middle of Meyer, one of the Humvees was a burning shell. The blast had blown the wheels off, which meant it had come from underneath. There was a hole in the asphalt under the truck. Someone had moved through the crawl space under the Auditorium Building and blown the shit out of the Guard. The smoke looked like a hydra, streaming out from under the Humvee in cohesive pillars. It smelled like smoke and sulfur. The brimstone from the underground sewer.
    Demolitions cooks were usually Secondary Party Members. Somebody had cooked the shit out of something before they stuck it under that Humvee.
    I thought about Four, staring at the mirror, dark snakes in the darkness. We had given her a black mask, and she wore black paint, like us.
    If the kid on the floor had been wearing a mask, the glass had torn it away.
    A different Humvee, farther up Meyer, opened fire on the Auditorium Building. There was a Guard in a riot mask firing the .50-caliber machine gun from the top of the truck’s frame.
    I saw two other Guards standing behind the Humvee, loading a rocket-propelled grenade launcher—an RPG, which was the same acronym we used for “role-playing game.” For D&D.
    I stepped away from the kid.
    •   •   •

    They’d retreated to the store’s office, on my orders.
    “We’re going to need the assault Humvee,” I told Levi.
    “Why?”
    I looked at him. I thought about that image on the Wailing Wall. It couldn’t have been real. I had nothing to worry about.
    But if it wasn’t, what else hadn’t been real?
    There would be nothing more from Fat Chance. White would never be Hope again. The Last Man was fucked from the get-go. After all,
last
implies the slow and eventual removal. Of everybody. Otherwise, he’d just be called “The Man.”
    If it was real, then it wasn’t going to go that way. Not if I could get that Humvee. Not if I had that .50-cal, and that RPG, and those nerve agents. If I had them, I could make them burn—anybody who wanted to make that message real.
    “No questions. Not in Party.”
    He remembered. Nodded.
    “What’s the complement?” he asked.
    I told him.
    “Armament?”
    I told him.
    I looked down. “Who’s this corpse?”
    In the back of the office, there were others, still alive. Mary was on her knees, writing something down—something one of them was saying. There were about ten of them. They looked scared. They were looking at Mary. At White Mary. At a new Hope.
    Four was kneeling against the other wall, whispering into one’s ear. A girl. She had her hands on the girl’s shoulders. The girl was nodding.
    “The corpse took a forty-four blast to the spine,” Levi said, “from the one with Four.”
    I looked at Four’s girl.
    “The corpse made a go at Mary when she stepped in to secure the room. The girl with the forty-four over there knew what the corpse was up to. Perfect angle. Knew the Plan. Overtake the Outsiders, I’m guessing.”
    “Didn’t seem to like the idea,” I said.
    I looked