Noise by Darin Bradley Page B

less like a guerrilla hero and more like a raccoon. She was our guest, Mary’s guest—I wanted to be cool. Wanted it to be cool. I knew how she felt.
    “You can ask anything else.”
    “Okay.”
    She didn’t look like things were cool.
    “You want an ashtray?
    You smoke?”
    “Yeah. Thanks.”
    “Why do you call her Mary?”
    I stacked the Strip-rat’s clothes by the door. Levi turned back to the black-and-white. The rat had been carrying a code in ink between his shoulder blades that we hadn’t encountered before: the code for the frequency of a magazine in Morse code—continuous broadcast. It must have been new. Levi found the frequency, and the ringing, arrhythmic Morse began chirping into the room. There was no video.
    “Was it worth it?” Ruth asked from the couch.
    “What?”
    “Taking his clothes.”
    Mary walked in, dabbing at her wet head with a SOUTH PADRE ISLAND beach towel.
    “Yeah.”
    “What news?” Mary asked. “Word on the Lull yet?”
    Levi was transcribing the broadcast magazine on a stenographer’s pad. One of several we’d taken from the office at work.
    “Not yet,” he said.
    “What’d you get from the rat’s clothes?”
    I looked at Ruth. “You’re going to need to make a decision.”
    “Why ‘Northern Lights’?”
    “Because when they burn, at night, it looks like the Northern Lights,” I said. “Lots of weird colors, not much sound.”
    Ruth snorted. “Some secret code that is.”
    Mary tucked her legs up under her. “Chisolm wants to burn all the substations at once? Kill all the electricity?”
    “After they do the Nine, maybe.”
    “Which one’s the Nine?”
    “It’s on the east side of the square, near the municipal center.”
    “It looks like an old brownstone house from the outside,” Levi said.
    “I’ve never noticed it before,” Ruth said.
    I smiled. “Exactly.”
    “Substations are eyesores,” Levi said. “So the city planners disguise them to maintain property values. Make them look like houses, office blocks—that sort of thing.”
    Against one wall, underneath the old display case my mother had used in her wedding shop, we had stacks of photocopied civil documents. Codes, edicts, census information. We’d paid almost a thousand dollars for it. Five hundred each, after financial aidhad disbursed last spring. The new city planners were into beautification. Substations, brick walks, renovating the Strip. We had it all.
    Levi pointed at the stack. “Read up if you want.”
    “Why’s it called ‘the Nine’? Is that code?”
    “No, it’s just substation number nine.”
    I didn’t say that we’d thought it was code, too. At first. Before we bought the stack.
    Ruth lit a cigarette. Mary did, too.
    “Why will they start there?” Ruth asked.
    Levi was transcribing the Morse ’zine again. He wasn’t listening.
    “Center of town,” I said. “Once the Nine goes, it’ll be easy for Salvage to move to the closest others. They aren’t far—a couple miles apart each. Once they’ve killed Three, Four maybe, transformers will start blowing all over town.”
    “Which means fires,” Mary said.
    “Yep. They want to start downtown to get the municipal center to start drawing from its generators. The sooner those die …”
    “What’s the grid? The yellow-brick road?”
    “The grid is the grid, the electrical grid.”
    I heard a bit of the ’zine ’cast. It was a schedule. I wasn’t sure what for. I’d missed the first part. Levi was being very quiet.
    “And what’s with all this terrorist shit? I thought you conspiracy-heads were about surviving, not … revolting.”
    “They’re speeding up the process. Salvage isn’t
supposed
to be out to
hurt
anybody—it’s
supposed
to be a
reaction
to the Event—but the sooner it cuts the systems that most people rely on, the sooner the unprepared will start dying off.”
    The girls just looked at me. Some jammer got ahold of the frequency, started ’casting numbers into the code. It