Noise by Darin Bradley

binocs.”
    “What?”
    “Binoculars. Give them to me.”
    She did.
    “Party, this is HOC. Go ahead.”
    I could see through the gaps in the old block, see the mid-century buildings on the other side of University Strip. The coffeehouses and bookstores and the bank that had been spared demolition and gentrification by a zoning debate. Most were closed. No doubt Big Red, the tavern around the corner, would still be open. One-dollar wells, two-dollar domestic drafts. “You call it” special—half off for the end of the world. Ladies get in free.
    But we were out of sight, and the Strip’s parking lot had been gnawed to shards last week. Amid protest. There had been a candlelight vigil for the 1920s-era brickwork nested in haphazard patches throughout the asphalt. Like continents. Those that made it right up to the end of things.
    The bricks would be repurposed downtown. Twenty dollars to donate one with your inscription to the city.
    The burned-out shell of Marco’s was ahead to our right. Students had chained themselves and made short films and ultimately burned the place down. In protest. Taking their bar before it could be stolen by the developers. Salvagers had quickly cleared out what paneling and tables had survived the fire. Marco’s was a grimoire of codes and stencils, carved and markered everywhere inside. Some on top of others. A Salvage speakeasy. Adam and I had bought our first crib sheet at Marco’s.
    It had one wall left, which would be the last to go before the faux-colonial prefab came in. Before gas lamps and fake stucco made ghost stories out of the old muggings and vandalism. The fights. Mainly, it would be last because it was a single condemnedwall—thanks to the arson—and needed special civil architects before it could be brought down.
    The Wall had once been a mural. Civilly funded graffiti art, when a crop of liberal city planners replaced the old conservative farming guard. Eventually, it became several murals. Then a paint-and-mortar notepad for taggers and Salvagers. We’d relied on it often, getting frequency shifts, ’cast schedules, and heads-ups. We were Masonic, gazing through layers of useless tags at an esoteric palimpsest, finding what we needed in pieces, looking through the Salvager’s camera obscura for perspective on the impending Collapse.
    “It’s from Chisolm, HOC. A signing-off. Stencil and crib-speak.”
    “Copy, Party. What’s the message?”
    I translated the vowel-less script: “‘Northern Lights on the Nine. Follow the grid—’”
    Something slammed into my door hard enough to pop my ears. I ducked and gunned the engine, the wheel already arced to turn us around. The wrong way down a one-way road. The right way now.…
Motivated perception, in turn, delimits the construction of your world…
.
    I realized, as our car tailed itself around, tires screaming—announcing itself through the gaps in the Strip, straight through to the shambling crowd outside Big Red—that there hadn’t been an explosion.
    Breaker
.
    Whatever it was had been thrown, or launched somehow.
    Breaker
.
    I flipped the headlights back on as I overcorrected. There was somebody in front of the car. We weren’t moving fast enough to do any real damage yet, but I pushed him off his footing—the baseball bat in his fists followed him down. By the time I slammedagain on the brakes, we’d already passed him a body’s-length under the axles.
    I remembered to depress the clutch. So the engine wouldn’t stall when the RPMs died. I tugged the sword past Ruth. I had to kick the door to get it open.
    “Out, Mary,” I ordered.
    Its fleece was white as snow
.
    She didn’t hesitate.
    He was getting up. A Hipster. A Strip-rat in old jeans and an undershirt. He had Salvage cryptography markered all over his clothes. A chunk of concrete sat nearby, where I’d stopped the car originally.
    When the demolition started, they’d had nowhere to go, the rats. The Strip was all places to them.