The Deluge, page 38
As the night crept closer, the lake came into view. A liquid keepsake of the Last Glacial Maximum. The pines surrounded this rippling black jewel, and the distant shores looked like a towering fortress wall. Crisp winds swayed the branches. Murdock lit one of his smokes and then handed one to Allen. The two men’s faces drew together as Allen lit his off the ember of Murdock’s.
“I don’t know why Lali’s still wetting herself.” Shane hated that she felt compelled to apologize again, but she couldn’t help it. “I thought I was done with that.”
“My youngest, Perry, was peeing himself until he was seven,” said Allen. He waved his cigarette hand around his be-hatted dome. “We thought it was because of the alopecia. It started in patches on my head and chest. He’d cry when he saw me until I finally just gave up and shaved everything, even my eyebrows. He got over it.” He sighed his smoke out through his nose, and it drifted into the clear sheen of his hairless brow. “Then again, the boy is nearly twenty and still lives with us, so what do I know.”
They were quiet for a moment, just enjoying the lake and the glow of the purple-gray sky while they trusted the ignorance of those who might watch from the heavens.
Shane finally said, “We need to talk about targets.”
“Patience, Shane,” Allen cautioned. “We’ll get there.”
She exhaled in frustration. “Now PRIRA is law, and it’s proof the political process vomits up nothing—or worse than nothing. We have the chance to be who people turn to.”
“I agree,” said Murdock.
“You two,” said Allen, “are running way ahead of yourselves.”
She couldn’t help but laugh. “We’re running out of road to get ahead of ourselves on, Allen!”
Murdock meandered toward the crest of the lake where water lapped against stones, and she and Allen followed, polar darkness creeping east. Murdock stared out over the water. She watched the blue smoke whispering out of his lips.
“In Iraq, when we were near Fallujah, one of the things the insurgents liked to do was get you to go through a door, and then they’d have it wired to blow. For a while, it seemed like they were wiring bombs to every goddamn door in the city. But then there were civilians, women and little kids, running around everywhere. And none of ’em ever got blown up. Or hardly any. We couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on. Even if these civilians were in on it, how was the information getting disseminated about every single door in an area with hundreds of thousands of people and nearly as many doors?” He picked up a rock and tried to skip it across the lake. It hit the water twice and then sank with a sound between a splat and a plop. “Then this guy I was EOD with, name of Kieran Slade, goes to our captain, this crazy weird fucker Ta’amu. He says, ‘Captain, it’s the house numbers.’ See, the house numbers were always messed up, like falling off or upside down. What they were doing was, if the house was wired to blow, an odd number would be missing or turned upside down or painted over or scratched up. If it was an even—like Forty-Two Allahu Akbar Road—it would have a new odd number added to it. Like an upside-down five. Pretty simple. Sorta like our code with the books. You don’t need nothing fancy because the other guy doesn’t know what to look for.”
MURDOCK Figured himself unlucky enough to be born in an era of murderous bipartisan military overreach. During Jo Hogan’s term, it tickled him the way she conjoined feminism and militarism so seamlessly, her embrace of Brandy Squires’s revelations and the Pentagon cover-up simultaneous. It was an open secret the military could be a real rape factory. Now the Dumbocrats ran vets at every level, and you could almost see in real time the wars coming home. He and his peers had cut their teeth on corralling, hunting, and monitoring brown people overseas. Now these veterans suddenly staffed every level of government. They brought skills and attitudes honed on the streets of Kabul and Fallujah and became cops and prison guards and senators and consultants to the defense industry. They chose their routes of right-wing extremism or intersectional patriotism. So when a Jo Hogan or Mary Randall or Vic Love inveighed against the threat of terrorism, almost no one blinked. In his time overseas, Murdock had gotten a sneak peek at what was gestating in the body politic, and the civvies would soon learn just how casual violence could be.
A startled heron burst from the nearby shore and soared across the lake, its tucked feet skimming a line in the placid water.
“So you stopped them?” asked Allen.
“For a while. We pretended we were getting lucky. Like every once in a while, Ta’amu’d even send a robot through a door just so it could get blown up, but pretty soon the insurgents figured out we’d figured it out. They moved on.”
He wetted dry lips so that they shone in the last of the light. “Those motherfuckers, AQI and the Mahdi Army, they were clever and barbaric and romantic. The civilians they’d killed—their families would be rooting for them anyway. That code? It became insurgent lore. Folk tales are inspiration. Reminds your people why you fight. Sometimes I think of us in that sense. If we’re not giving people a story, there ain’t no point. Might as well chuck our tears at the sky.”
He met Shane’s gaze when he said this, and she stepped away, to the shoreline’s nearest pine.
“Some narratives are better than others, though, Murdock,” Allen said.
“Oh sure, Professor.”
“What about Slade?” Shane asked, running her fingers over cold bark. “He’s dead, I take it. Got blown up going through a door after they switched the system.”
“Nah. He’s fine. Hates my guts for going antiwar, never spoke to me again, but he made it just fine.”
To Shane it sounded like there was way more to that story, but it was almost dark. She said as much to her friends. The three of them turned and headed back up the hill where a bitter dark swallowed the cabin.
* * *
That night, unable to sleep, Shane left Lali in bed and crept down to the living room where she found Quinn awake, indulging in a twenty-four-hour news network and the copy of a print newspaper left on the end table. Volume hushed, her attention flitted between the newsprint and screen where a young Dan Rather, CBS’s granite-faced star of the late twentieth century, held forth.
“Should you be watching that?” she said.
“Jesus!” Quinn clapped a hand to her chest.
“You scared the shit out of me, Shane.”
“Sorry, I couldn’t sleep.”
Digital resurrection was a nifty trick, and on the TV, CGI Dan Rather sent it off to a correspondent reporting from CPAC where that woman Braden was the headliner. At every sight of her, Shane felt a darkness creep into her periphery, something she was sure every person of color felt from time to time, this unsettling understanding that you are a part of a place where you don’t belong and have never belonged, where at any moment, the violence that made this world possible might erupt anew.
THE MIDTERMS The Republican Party had shattered its chains. Gone were the Obama-era Tea Partiers, careful to disguise their racism behind a veneer of concern for the deficit. Vanquished were the squishy Trumpist apparatchiks trying to remain obsequious under shifting sands of presidential whims. This new crop were honest-to-God Klansman, theocrats, and outspoken fascists. Top priorities included bringing the death penalty for abortion doctors and any woman who sought the procedure, an end to birthright citizenship, and a Muslim registry, once and for all.
THE WEATHERMEN, WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE Read a sign above Jennifer Braden’s worlde set.
CHINA Had its hands full. The Communist Party was arresting people by the thousands in an attempt to contain the Minyun democracy movement, which had cracked open the Great Firewall with multiple cyberattacks. The weather was also savaging the country: images of floods shredding whole towns to splinters and inundating cities to the second floors of office towers in Guangxi Province, while wildfires in Sichuan had killed 134 people in the past month.
AUSTRALIA Terrifying images of Perth. Dan Rather narrated over images of glowing orange hills, the city choking in smoke from wildfires. Protestors were lying down in front of the Carmichael Mine, but policy refused to acknowledge the obvious links, and the coal kept flowing.
MACKOWSKI AND BRADEN Mackowski had declared his intent to challenge President Randall for the nomination but was being taunted by the Right’s vicious Barbie pit bull. Braden advocated that land mines be planted in the desert along the US-Mexico border. Mackowski, backed into a corner, promised to introduce a land mine bill in the next Congress. Rumor had it she had her own presidential aspirations. Announcement forthcoming.
MISCELLANEOUS TERRORS Hindus massacring Muslims in India. A mutated strain of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis blazing through the Russian prison system, killing an average of nearly eight hundred prisoners a day. The island nation of Tuvalu preparing to abandon its land as seawater crippled the last of its infrastructure. Quinn ran her fingers along a faint scar on her left wrist: a teenage suicide effort. She’d undergone treatments of electroconvulsive therapy, and the induced seizures brought her peace like nothing else had. Now, she preferred ketamine treatments.
HORROR DRONES The combat footprint of the US now stretched from Kyrgyzstan to Angola. The latest imperial weapon was a hovering machine gun the size of a large dog that could buzz through doorways, caves, or sewers, fire its M4, launch grenades, or perform crowd control with high-decibel speakers and rubber bullets. The Northrup XR-32 earned its name from the pilots who tended to adorn the faceless sensor panel with the war paint of such iconic pop culture images as the hockey mask of serial killer Jason Voorhees or the metalloid-skeletal grin of the Terminator. In CBS’s slavish story on the new sci-fi nightmare, one pilot petted his drone and said, “We chase terrorists through their holes flashing the strobe [lights] and blaring death metal. I can’t imagine how terrifying that would be.”
THE PASTOR This B-list actor turned jolly preacher-guru had erupted into mainstream stardom and now his fellow Evangelicals were having buyer’s remorse. He misquoted the Bible or made up new passages, they moaned, yet his book God Has a Plan for You had sold 1.3 million copies in 2030. He claimed he’d prophesied Covid-19 as well as the “great storm coming to wash away the sinful” just before Hurricane Alberto hit Virginia Beach. Now he was declaring that the “vipers’ nest of sin known as Hollywood” would “suffer in hellfire for shutting out Christianity.” While Los Angeles County would certainly experience its standard round of wildfires every summer, one poll found an astonishing 39 percent of the country believed this idiot to be a prophet of God, according to Gallup. He was coming out with his own branded Bible.
“Join the club,” said Quinn, and she muted the television. Shane moved to sit beside her.
“I thought we agreed to keep this unplugged,” she said.
“Fine.” Quinn got up and janked the plug from the wall, short-circuiting Braden’s wet, red-lipsticked mouth as she joyfully inflamed the crowd. “I just couldn’t think of anything else to do.” Quinn tapped the newspaper on the end table. “They have a story about Kroll. Civil rights and enviro folks are trying to get him out of solitary confinement.”
“And I hope they succeed.”
“You think you could handle that? Twenty-three-hour lockdown?”
“I will if I have to.”
Quinn nodded but this clearly did not satisfy her. She’d been Kai’s recruit, their activist pasts overlapping somewhere that neither of them spoke of. She did her job well, but she also flaunted simple rules, like turning on the TV when she thought she was alone. Shane knew Quinn had grown up rich, attended an Ivy, and only toyed with hacktivism before moving on to one of the top cybersecurity firms in the Valley. All that blond arrogance made Shane deeply distrustful.
FREE MILES KROLL Obnoxious that he’d become their public face. Stuck in prison, he had do-gooders raising money for his defense. But Miles was a gutless coward, who’d tried to sell their operation out for a few years off his sentence. After his capture, they’d put more safeguards in place and Quinn had doxxed, manipulated, and harassed his family into deep space, adding child pornography to his father’s computer, ruining his mother’s credit, and serving Kroll’s whole sad life on a platter to the Feds to keep him in there permanently. She showed this example to operatives now, like a head on a pike.
“So why do we let them dictate to us?” Quinn wondered. Her head bobbed at the stairs. “Those three. Especially Kai.”
“I don’t see it that way.”
“Then what exactly do you see? He’s got the Benefactor, so he’s got the money. Wouldn’t your life be easier with a couple grand a month more?”
“It’s a firewall.”
“Like you and Tinkerbell, huh? And what if you or Kai get caught. Where does that leave us?”
QUINN More or less feared Shane, and then resented herself for being afraid. Shane’s eyes were sleepy, dark brown pools, and they simply betrayed nothing. No matter how much she dug into the woman’s past, utilizing every tool at her disposal, there was nothing there before roughly 2013. Obviously, “Shane Acosta” was not her real name and yet that identity tracked. She looked like a real person, and Quinn could not figure out how she’d done it. It scared her that this frazzled single mother, who couldn’t find a babysitter for her kid, might be smarter than her. Which was why, when she’d heard Shane awake and moving in her room, she’d gone downstairs and turned on the TV. To see if she could get her alone for a moment, away from the men. To put out the first simple feelers.
“There are contingencies in place. This woman—Tinkerbell— had to beat multiple brain scan polygraphs. She’s the real deal, and she’s putting herself at just as much risk as we are.”
Quinn picked up an empty beer bottle that wasn’t hers and began to glumly scrape the label free from the coffee-dark glass.
“Shane, if you want to broach subjects that no one else will…” Outside the window, dawn had begun to crack the night, and there was that eerie blue-gray glow overcoming the woods. Quinn had a cruel and excited look, like a sorceress about to conjure black magic into the room. “I’m with you. One thing you should know, though. If we get caught”—a burst of winter wind rattled the windowpanes—“I have a bottle of prescription painkillers that I’m going to eat like cereal.”
* * *
On their last day, over dinner, talk turned to Kate Morris and A Fierce Blue Fire.
“We should thank our lucky stars,” said Kai. “They’re so obsessed with Morris, they have no idea what they’re looking for. That’s why I was saying PRIRA is our friend. Eviscerating civil liberties is every Fed, cop, and politician’s first approach. It keeps them looking at all the wrong people in all the wrong places.”
“And that dumb floozy helped to pass it,” said Murdock.
“I think,” said Allen, “that you folks should accept the idea that her movement has been complementary to ours. We’re not antagonists.”
“Yeah, screw that,” said Kai. “She spent ten years pretending at revolution while she eff-you-see-kayed celebrities and spread memes. That’s the Left, Allen. It’s a Facebook page that occasionally sends its troops into the streets with cute signs before they hit the yoga studio.”
“Mama,” said Lali from the seat beside her. “I need a spoon. The fork doesn’t work.”
“She was the climate reality show du jour,” said Quinn. “But now she’s learning what all women learn: Don’t get crow’s-feet or they’ll recast your ass.”
“I still wouldn’t kick her out of bed for eating crackers,” said Murdock.
Shane slammed her fork down on the table. “Could we please give it a fucking rest?”
KAI It wasn’t like he didn’t share her disdain for the quasi-celebrities the climate non-movement kept spitting up. Hell, that was one of the first things he and Shane bonded over when they met in NOLA. This wasn’t about Morris, though. For her to snap at them like that, something else must be going on. He’d been worried about Shane all weekend. She had a nervous edge to her, and he’d catch her face twitching like she was gritting through some kind of chronic pain. The way she looked at Lali worried him especially.
Lali popped her head up, alarmed more by the tone than the F-word. They were all looking at her now.
“I’m just so sick of everything about that woman.”
There was a moment of quiet, and then Allen said, “Okay. New subject.” And they all moved on.
After dinner, Lali was riled up, jumping on the bed in her pajamas and giggling while Badman Kai swooped around the room using a blanket as a cape. It was only in this moment that Shane realized Lali was saying “Badman” when she meant “Batman.” This was another one of her malapropisms that actually made more sense, like how she called the shuttle bus that zipped around KU’s campus the “shuffle bus.” It did sort of shuffle, and Batman was a bad man, the spoiled son of a billionaire waging his own one-man paramilitary war. When she played Tracy Chapman, Lali would sing her favorite song loudly and enthusiastically, “Don’t you eat all the shiny apples / Don’t you taste all of my fruit.”
“Lali, time to settle down,” she said.
“I’m settling down!” Lali shrieked happily, then starfished backward onto the bed with a whoomph of the mattress and a giggle like the Joker. It took her and Kai another ten minutes and a mix of stern and sweet to cajole her under the covers. She worked herself into the crook of Kai’s arm as he began to read to her.
