Read Online Noise by Darin Bradley - Free Book Online Page B

clean.
    “Drop the pack.” I was standing in front of the door.
    “Or what? You’ll kill me?”
    “Ruth—”
    “I can’t believe you brought me here, Jo. What the fuck!”
    “Yes,” I said.
    “Yes, what?”
    “Yes, I’ll kill you.”
    She was calmer now. Remembering, I guess. Thinking of the rat in the street by the Strip. “You’re not wearing your … your paint.”
    “Ruth, sit down.”
    “Drop the pack, Ruth.”
    “We have to stay together.”
    “You have to make a decision.”
    I convinced myself that my totem was an eagle. I was into eagles. I was part Indian. An Eagle Scout. I made fetishes out of grapevine and raffia and gave them to my friends like some shaman.
    The eagle was a better me than me. My totem.
    Afterward, we went to Cassandra’s house. The guy on the Navajo rug was her husband. I hadn’t caught that. We smoked pot and talked about gaming. They gamed, too, and thought I might like to join.
    Was that it? It’s just what I decide? The totem is what I decide?
    Was that spiritual? I was being open-minded.
    “Open Minds,” Beginner’s Zazen, all welcome,
Thursday, 7:30 PM , Room 255, Auditorium Building

    What did it mean that I had bottles of unrefined frankincense at home? A baggie of Dittany-of-Crete. One mandrake root. A mortar-and-pestle I’d bought in an online auction. The Southern Baptist Convention disallowed female preachers, and incense came in colored sticks from the drugstore, not in roots and weird powders. What I knew was clearly not what I knew.
    I made my own potions, my own blends, finally a fucking shaman. I followed recipes from a book and highlighted words like
empower
and
release
. I had done this in the evening when Adam had class. The first year. Trying to figure things out.
    Ruth let Mary sit her down. I lowered the point of the sword.
    “You need to keep an open mind about this.”
    It was quiet, even after the Northern Lights faded. The university would be dark, too, but they had generators. We had one, but it wasn’t for Slade. It was for later.
    The jammer had disappeared from the Morse ’zine. We weren’t sure when the next substation would go.
    “All right,” Ruth said.
    “All right.”
    “I get it.”
    “It’s all equal. Once we get out.”
    “Yeah.”
    “Nobody’s going to tell you what to do, except the whole of the Group.”
    “I get it.”
    “But—”
    “I get it.”
    “You get it?” I got up and grabbed the Strip-rat’s folded clothes. I tossed them onto her lap. “You get it?”
    “Yeah.”
    “The Group is everything. Outsiders are our enemies. Predators. People who will take what we have, however they can. They’re going to become desperate.”
    “I get it.”
    She tucked her hair behind her ears. Mary was sitting cross-legged next to me, between me and Levi.
    “Do you have family or something? Out … there? At this place?” Ruth asked.
    “Something.”
    “Where is it?”
    I looked at Levi.
    “If we tell you, you have no choice. You either come along, or we have to neutralize you before we leave.”
    I looked back at Ruth.
    “I get it. Where is it?”
    Even Mary was looking.
    I pointed to the safety pin.
    There.
    “Is anyone else coming?”
    “No.”
    “What about, like, your parents?”
    “Don’t ask about our parents.”
    “No one else is coming.”
    The fires didn’t start immediately after Salvage cut the power to the yellow-brick road. We waited for the schedule ’zine, theMorse bulletin, to re-’cast. From the beginning. Broadway had some time left. The fires would be burning out in the Red Light District now. There were only rumors of prostitutes there, but everyone had a story about “seeing” one. The gangs were there, and they’d been first with the fires. With one another.
    The square was a column of smoke, but without any wind it only went upward. A wall with nothing to enclose. It
was
the enclosure. Whoever had Placed the old courthouse was in some shit now. I stood on the porch, in the