The Deluge, page 25
THEN A FEW WEEKS LATER After the mark had given up hope that such a dream gig would come through, Allen would put in the call. “Could you deliver some shit to the company’s storage locker over in [Insert Small Town Here]? We’ll reimburse you for the materials, plus gas, plus $500 for the day’s work? Here, write this down: rotary cutter blades, a timing belt for a box scraper, a rake, four fifty-pound bags of fertilizer, and blasting caps for removing stubborn tree stumps. Yeah, drop it all off at this locker—write the lock combo down—and I’ll come pick it up in a couple days. Thanks, man, you’re really saving our asses. Just can’t afford to have the IRS penalizing us for a fiftieth employee.” For the guy trying to feed a wife and three kids, it was too good to be true, which meant they never questioned it. All the materials remained two steps removed from Murdock.
He gave her work gloves, and they went about unloading the van. Shane had to swallow her sandpaper throat just to touch the two fifty-pound bags of ammonium nitrate fertilizer or the fifty-five-gallon plastic barrels the color of a cloudless sky. Even disassembled, the materials felt terrifying, holy. When she reached for a bundle secured with brown paper and duct tape, Kel took the package from her.
“Tovex sausage,” he said. “But probably we don’t wanna grill it.”
She tried to sound casual as she retracted her hand and let him take it. “How fucked would I have been if I got stopped with all this?”
“Pretty good and fucked. Just think about my ass. I gotta drive three vans of this shit to the drop site in Kentucky.”
She hauled a bag of fertilizer down the stairs into Kel’s office. Lit by a single overhead fluorescent, the workspace was dense with blue drums, fertilizer, Tovex bundles, and plastic jugs of nitromethane. Tools lay scattered on a workbench: wire, pliers, grinders, gloves, safety goggles, pink prills, detonating cord, boxes of little sticks she knew to be blasting caps. She’d never seen the ingredients like this—just the results, which always seemed weak and ineffectual through the scrim of the news networks. It was why the media still referred to them as “student terrorists.”
Her hip grazed one of the empty plastic barrels, and she jerked away as if her touch might set off the room. “So don’t light a match down here,” she said.
“Light all the matches you want. Motherfuckers’ll see it from space.”
“How are you on this stuff?”
“Slow-going. Straw buyers are mostly working out. One guy got sent up six months for forging a check, so he’s out. But Kai is right about one thing: You send someone to buy two hundred pounds of fertilizer, and he ain’t from the fucking Mid-Tennessee Farming Co-op, you’re raising red flags. Same for all this shit.”
MURDOCK Trusted Shane and Kai but did not always appreciate the contortions they built into every operation. You left keys under passenger-side doors, and some unknown kid from Atlanta picked up the vehicle two days later. It was a lot for his brain to keep straight. Still, he’d told Shane and himself: “I’m along for this ride as far as it takes me.” Whenever he briefly forgot what the others looked like, he’d review a note he’d written to himself that he kept in a junk drawer at home. Probably not great to have around if the ATF ever descended but it kept him straight when he got their coded messages and couldn’t remember who they were from or what he was doing.
THE NOTE Kai = Black maybe some Oriental in him nice-guy shtick thinks he’s in charge. Allen = all bald wizened kinda light in the loafers really good cook. Quinn = prissy stuck-up rich-bitch computer gal probably doesn’t give head fired her own boyfriend once at computer job. Shane = IVAW, remember? Mexi hottie boombalottie don’t be weird w/ her.
“But now we have all the vans.”
“Sure.” He snatched up the pliers. “I’ll probably get all the materials by February. Maybe March. That ain’t the issue so much. We still got what you might call reconnaissance problems. How to approach the targets.”
“We’re working on it.”
“Well,” he picked at the skin of his thumb with the pliers, as if digging for a splinter, “work harder.”
Shane’s eyes wandered to the shelves behind the workbench: a water purifier, a machete, boxes of ammo, a med pack, a flashlight radio, and two handguns with full clips lying beside them. A Tyvek suit with masks, gloves, booties, and dozens of jugs of bleach to wipe down materials and vehicles. Their own DNA was perpetually trying to snitch. There was only so much their data scientist, Quinn, could do with her backdoors into the FBI’s Terrorist Explosive Device Analytical Center.
“You’re going full survivalist on me, Kel.”
“Y’all keep telling me the world’s coming to an end.” He rubbed a hand over his paunch. “You and me could be real cozy in this place is all I’m saying.”
She tried to return his smile but couldn’t take her attention from the full clips lying beside each weapon. “C’mon. Cook me dinner with your nuclear bunker food.”
* * *
Disappearing meant something different for each of them. Murdock had been to antiwar rallies, but he could retrench into his stereotype: posting to Facebook the hyper-conservative screeds of a revanchist rural white male. His digital trail consisted of ranting about Joanna Hogan and the Democrats, extolling the virtues of the Trump era, and sharing obnoxious Russ Mackowski bromides. If you were, say, the NSA and scrutinizing these bread crumbs, you’d find a lonely bachelor, an engineer, and the veteran of a war no one wanted to remember, who thought Randall was a socialist, who celebrated the anniversary of the Henderson-Rua fight as the greatest of all time. You’d see a man with a mortgage on a humble one-story in suburban Nashville, who drank too much beer, had put on a considerable amount of weight since his army days, and had a spartan Match.com profile. If you were taking a serious look, you’d find that back in 2014, he’d broken digital ties with one Luciana Alvarez of New Orleans on multiple platforms.
They’d underestimated what they were taking on. Shane’s activism had taken her from post-Katrina New Orleans to Bolivia, Venezuela, Colombia, and back to the post–Deepwater Horizon Gulf. This surely made her a target for the security state’s algorithms.
“We have to assume we’ve all been red-flagged for our personalities and politics,” Quinn explained to them in their first meeting together at the cabin in Wisconsin. “We have to assume EOD techs are all under soft surveillance due to their skill sets.” This was Shane’s first time meeting the woman and her first wake-up call about what they were actually embarking upon, launching her down this endless road of passion, loneliness, paranoia, and fear. You could read about corporate and government tracking capabilities, you could study the unchecked organism with roots in the CIA, FBI, NSA, DHS, and the Pentagon, but the average citizen could not wrap their head around its true scope. “And so much of it is our own fault,” Quinn had said coldly, her chin propped on her knuckles, firelight on her pretty but severe face. “We all gladly and willingly herded ourselves into this state of technofascism.”
“All I’m hearing from you,” Shane said, “is why this won’t work. Why are you here if you’re this scared?”
An argument erupted. For days, they’d been close to concluding that they should all just melt away and pretend none of this had ever been on the table. Not for the last time, Shane took control of the conversation.
“We shouldn’t be afraid,” she said. “It’s a panopticon.”
“I know,” said Allen. “That’s what Quinn is saying.”
Shane took the problem into her hands, cupping it in front of these new comrades. “You misunderstand the panopticon. The point isn’t to watch everyone; it’s to give the illusion of total surveillance. For the actual watchers, they can only point their eyes in so many directions at once. The amount of data overwhelms and confounds. It helps us.”
QUINN Frequently wondered how Shane managed this. Quinn, who’d dealt with supposedly nonhierarchical consensus decision making in her hacktivist days, figured the dynamic out quickly. It was clear, Shane was their quiet internal compass, and she appeared not to have hesitation or indecision inside of her. Meanwhile, Quinn crawled into a new life of suffocating emotional isolation. She would be on dates in San Francisco sometimes and feel the urge to simply confess the entire operation to a boring programmer talking himself up. She often woke from nightmares of being caught while simultaneously wishing, sometimes, that it would just happen.
While Kai and Quinn wanted to recruit computer programmers and hi-tech savants to build them anonymizing software that would bounce their IP addresses all over the world, Shane told them: “No. We take it the other way. Like every good insurgency, we defeat hi-tech with low-tech.”
So they dispersed. They adopted normal lives. They stayed patient. They deactivated their activism. They encrypted nothing. They’d all be red-flagged for the rest of their lives with user scores utilizing logistic regression to estimate the likelihood they were involved in illegal activities, but so would an Everest-sized haystack of ordinary people. So they Googled. They Facebooked. And now they Slapdished. They bought face creams and eyeliners and power saws on Amazon. They polluted their data with tedium. They built profiles of themselves as average, boring, troubled, lonesome Americans who looked like anyone else enjoying the privileges and rewards of conformity.
Meanwhile, they sent messages via PO boxes and safe houses, which, like the old Camry, were owned by one of a few different limited liability companies in New Mexico. They coordinated mostly through junk-mail flyers: YOU COULD ALREADY BE A MILLIONAIRE! A delighted woman held a lotto ticket crammed with numbers, small enough that you needed a magnifying glass to read, which corresponded to pages, lines, words, and characters in the Signet mass-market paperback edition of Stephen King’s The Stand. If the FBI kicked down their doors, the flyers would be ashes and The Stand would sit unassuming on a bookshelf.
This was how she’d received Kai’s message in early November: We need you on the road.
Due to the firewalls, it had to be Shane to activate the Second Cell by delivering the contact info to Jansi, and if she was going to New Hampshire, she could also make a delivery to Tennessee. And if she was doing all that, she could run an errand of her own and check a mailbox in Tonganoxie on her way home.
* * *
“Randall says she’s gonna pass a New Green Dealy, first order of bidness,” Murdock said over a wagging cigarette. He stirred a powdered pesto sauce into water and olive oil. “What say you, Shane? Victory is ours?”
“Yeah, and more tax cuts for the oligarchs and more detention centers.” She sat on his bed, paging through a book he was reading. The Last of the Wild. Free of the wig, her scalp still itched. “And a fully militarized border.”
“She’s got Saudi Arabia and Nigeria on her plate, gas prices spiking, price of solar is cheap as ever, her party only controls one thingy in the Congress, so she needs Dems if she wants to do anything. Might could happen, as they say.”
“Wake me up when it does.”
She opened to his bookmark and read from an underlined paragraph: How did the creatures of the Pleistocene deal with these catastrophic temperature swings? They ran—migrating on immense, continental scales.
“To fight the empire, you fight the source of its power.” He dropped a handful of angel hair into the pot of boiling water, mashed it down with a wooden spoon. “You told me that in the Bob Evans, remember? Way before the ecology shit.”
“That’s what we’re doing.”
“Fighting? Are we? Or are we just horseflies? Biting at the murderer’s ankles while the shit goes down.”
“That’s why Kai pushed for this escalation. No more pipelines.”
He clucked his tongue. “Kai. The man with his hand in every pot, plot, and plan.”
Murdock was given to talking like this, good-naturedly testing his compatriots’ assumptions. When they first got together, he was eager to build bombs, even though he was skeptical of the “global heating hoopla.”
They ate in collapsible lawn chairs near the warmth of the stove, plates balanced on knees. Kel drank from a cup of whiskey while Shane stuck with water. The lamp cast a long shadow over a gruesome poster she hadn’t noticed before: HATE above a picture of militiamen bravely charging across the desert borderlands.
HATE Murdock loved his posters. This one popularized by the Jen Braden crowd. “It’s not offensive,” they insisted, and Kel Murdock found this deeply funny in that gallows way he most appreciated. It gave him a laugh, all these hard-core War on Terror vets following the panpipe of this rich, racist princess: Nothing to be offended about, these patriots swore. All it meant was HUNT ALL TRAITORS TO EXTINCTION.
He pulled out his phone to show her what she’d be driving into: video of Oklahoma in a dust storm so thick the shapes of roads and buildings looked like the infrastructure from a city of ghosts.
“Lawrence is far enough east you won’t be going right through it, but you’ll get a taste.”
She watched as a woman wearing swimming goggles and holding a scarf to her face guided a group of teenage students into one of those quickly erectable annex classrooms, the kind they threw up when schools got too crowded and didn’t have money for new construction.
“This is it,” she said, keeping all the dread she felt out of her voice. “The new Dust Bowl.” Shane set down her plate, her taste buds sore from all the salt of Kel’s recipe. “Is your apprentice ready?”
Murdock nodded as if satisfied by a child’s success on a soccer field. “He’s sharp. Even had some halfway good ideas for our next operation.” The new bomb maker had been the culmination of a two-year search, the screening process heightened and sensitive beyond their norms. They’d dropped contact with three other candidates before finding a student from the Georgia Institute of Technology. “Now that we’re cutting ties, and he’s going with your girl, Jansi, I realize I’m gonna miss the kid. He loved learning. Makes me think I should go into teaching.”
“They don’t have your kind of classroom at your average technical college.” Her eyes fell on the rifle in the corner, the smooth grain of the wood finish. “I’m thinking we should meet up. The Principals,” she said. “After this op.”
He scraped at pesto sauce and licked the tines of his fork. “If you insist.”
He finished his whiskey in one pull and set it on the floor. He put his hand on her knee and leaned over from his chair. She let herself be kissed but did not open her mouth to return it. He eased away from her. The pesto smell of his breath lingered.
“Probably a bad idea,” he admitted.
“Probably.”
Embarrassed, he snatched the plates up, took them to the small sink with the piping exposed and tangled like a toy model of a refinery. She wondered how he could possibly still feel this for her. The gray in her hair, the weight she kept adding. Before she’d left Kansas, she’d taken a picture of her face, and the image rocked her. She looked like she was melting.
“Can I—” he stopped. “Will you sleep next to me tonight? Promise I’ll keep my hands to myself.”
He sounded like a child asking his mother if he could crawl into her bed during a thunderstorm. She hated that it made her wish for her own mother—on the street, dead, wherever she might be.
Beneath the comforter, in her sweats and tank top, Shane let him put his arms around her and dip his face into her neck where his breath whistled.
Before she fell asleep, he asked her what she was afraid of. “If you get afraid of anything, that is.”
So she told him.
* * *
On the highway west over the plains of Missouri, the sky was a color she’d never seen before, a hellfire arterial crimson. According to the radio, this was the soil of the plains, ripped from the roots by a hard wind and borne skyward. She knew the color was the result of the grains in these galaxies of dust performing with the dissipating sunlight. It gave the air texture. The fibrous atmosphere on the approach to Hades. Now her mask was for more than just disrupting FaceRec cameras. When she stopped, she could rub her fingertips and come away with a thin black resin and imagined what this must look like inside people’s lungs. The dust coalesced in pockets that hung in the air like jellyfish. The farther west she drove, the larger the dust piles grew, brown snowdrifts against the sides of homes and strip malls, piled in parking lot dunes, stirred into a miasmic cloak by traffic. She took the highway through Kansas City. Even with the lights of the cars—bright white dyads in the oncoming lane, cheap red in hers—the city had a feeling of abandonment, a shrouded necropolis. The few haunted figures she saw slogging through the streets wore masks and goggles and carried flashlights, the beams of which looked solid when interacting with the dust. Overpass signs warned caution. Reduce speed. Wear a mask or particulate filter even indoors. The lights of police cars and ambulances strobed through the dusk. And this was just the tail end of the storm, the dissipation of the cloud that had torn across the plains. A state of emergency in five states.
