The Deluge, page 83
Shane looked to Murdock. “Kel? Tell me you’re not with them on this.”
Murdock kept right on staring at the sea. He made a soft shrug of his shoulders. “I’ll get home tomorrow and barely remember this. I’ll have a thought or memory, and I can remember having the thought or remembering the thing, but I can’t recall the thing itself. Little like going insane, slow-rolling, for thirty-some years.”
“That’s not an answer,” she hissed.
“Oh, Shane, my love.” He finally looked at her, sadly. “There are no answers no more.”
KAI Ground his fingernails into his palms. It wasn’t just the massacre in D.C. that had rewired his thinking. Across the world, they were finally breaking through. He wanted to tick off on his fingers for Shane: The hundreds of aboriginals and whites in Australia who’d blockaded then stormed the Carmichael Mine, destroying millions of dollars of equipment before being beaten and arrested by police. The Minyun in China leading sabotage campaigns against government, military, and fossil-fuel targets. The two women who’d set themselves on fire outside the school of the Indian prime minister’s daughter so that the whole country had to watch them burn. The twelve-year-old Palestinian girl who was organizing people to walk into Israeli bullets in Gaza, demanding food, water, and release. And right here, Louisiana’s own: the Mossville Raiders monkeywrenching the oil, gas, and petrochemical industries that ruled the acid wetlands. This is what we worked for! Kai wanted to scream at her. Why are you cowering now? We are the fucking Weathermen, and they are finally afraid of us.
The waiter approached, and they went quiet. He babbled about what a nice day it was, how the weather had talked about rain, but here they were serving outside, et cetera. Shane went through the motions of listening, but her heart pounded and her mind spun through every fear and regret.
Kai waited until the waiter was out of earshot. He said, “I’m sure you’ve seen these people self-immolating.”
“So?”
“And the group that drove a boat into the Petrobras platform—”
“Yes, Kai, I have access to the news too.”
“We’ve served as an inspiration, Shane.” He leaned forward and thumped two fingers on the table. “People are pouring gasoline on themselves. They are putting the violence of this system in front of those perpetrating it. Now it’s on us to take the next step. The financial and industrial elite are not ashamed of themselves, and they’re not about to let go of their power. We had no idea how far they would go. We sat around for too long telling ourselves we were a political movement or a social movement. We carried that fairy tale for so long because we didn’t want the alternative to be true. Because the truth is, this is a war.”
“And people have died, Kai.”
“And people have died,” he agreed. The wind gusted again, wetting rich men’s eyes, while the sound of silverware scraping plates and low chatter filled the silence.
Murdock thumped his forearm down on the table, twisting his enormous body to display his new tattoo.
“Look!”
There was a beat. Shane read it anyway: TASTES LIKE CHICKEN AND WE’LL ALL BE WITH GOD SOON.
Quinn said, “I don’t get it, Kel.”
He retracted the arm. “Yeah, neither do I. Barely remember when I had it inked. Just woke up one night with it in my head, then a couple days later there I am applying moisturizer stuff to a crusty new tat. I’m pretty sure it’s something this guy I knew in EOD said. He was like my mentor, my father, my brother, and now I don’t remember his name or what he looked like. But maybe it just means we’ll all pass on and, disappointingly, every fucking thing just tastes like chicken.” He downed the rest of his beer. “Just a theory, though.”
* * *
Before driving back to the motel, to make sure she wasn’t being followed, Shane took a drive through the streets of Pass Christian. She remembered one pink house in particular, still there all these years after her father found beach parking in front of it. He’d claimed the beaches west of Gulfport were less crowded. That had been their first summer in Mississippi after moving from California so her dad could follow the oil patch work, and he’d been eager to show his gals how wonderful it was. Her mom put on a brave face, but her unease was right at the surface. She’d left her family for California, married a bawdy roughneck who spoke no Spanish, and then followed him to the awful heat and hostile politics of the Deep South. Still, those Mississippi years had been good ones. They had a bigger house, Shane had her own bedroom, and their street had plenty of kids on it. A tight-knit blue-collar community where everyone had a parent working on a rig or at a refinery. She spent her time exploring the streams and fields of the town, on the hunt for turtles or herons or ants—whatever wildlife felt challenging to capture on a digital camera or in a glass jar or aquarium. It always smelled of rotting oyster shells, and the kids on her block were a mini UN: Vietnamese, Black, white, and her best friend for a while was a girl from something called the Jena Band of Choctaw Indians.
Gazing at that pink house, Shane could almost hear her father’s voice. Not particular words but the big, booming squall. The whole winds of the earth seemed to live in his lungs. Her dad suffered no bullshit, but he believed in chivalry. He kept a curving Wild West mustache that made his mouth look droopy. He always had grease stains on his clothes. Even after he showered, he would still smell of machine oil and the popcorn scent of sawdust. He loved Westerns and watched his favorite until the VHS didn’t work anymore. He only ever used Spanish for nicknames. Her mom was, of course, “Mamacita” or sometimes “Mamacita caliente” and Shane was “Ojitos.” Little eyes. He was, he said, “As old-school as a knuckle whack with a ruler.” He didn’t like excuses, complaining, whining, or feeling sorry for yourself. He thought people should work hard and treat everybody fairly. He’d been an unbearably decent man.
She followed on his hip. Every project, she would be his helper, whether it was picking out tools while he lay fiddling under their car or handing him nails while he redid the fence. She learned every kind of wrench and screwdriver because she was no help to him if she didn’t know the right one. His job was called a tool pusher. She loved the sound of that word.
He’d been gone on his hitch for only three days. Killed in an accident. The thought that arrived first: How was that even possible? It had never occurred to her that people you loved could go off to do something they always did and then just be gone with no warning. She’d screamed and wailed and covered herself in his dirty clothes from the hamper like she could summon him back to life with her anger. A wave of grief so black and violent ensued. It felt like a shroud over the world. But that had only been the beginning. She and her mom were alone on the Mississippi coast with only a small payout from her father’s death and her mom’s paycheck from a salon.
Her mom had been a clever woman and a vivid storyteller. When Shane was little, she hadn’t wanted to learn to read because she didn’t like kiddie stories. So her mom spun tales carried from another continent. She spoke of the warrior whom the gods turned into a dolphin and El Silbón, the whistling man. These stories were strange and terrifying. Finally, her mom wrote all her tales out longhand so Shane could practice her reading in Spanish and English. She’d loved watching her parents flirt, how her mom would come up behind her father and dance into his back, running her nails through his thick hair. Her mom would pull it, smell it, taste the sweat on his neck. She’d seen how intense her mother’s attraction had been, bone-deep and right on the surface of the flesh. And when he was gone, her mom’s devastation was just as bright. Shane never saw her drink more than a glass of wine, but after the accident her mom was drunk every night. And then every day and night.
Soon she found the bottles stashed everywhere, in drawers, under the sink, in the bathroom cabinet. Like her mom couldn’t be bothered to walk to a different room for vodka. She forgot about Shane. She vanished into her bottles, and then she vanished for good. Shane came home from school one day and her mom was just gone. Drawers empty. Suitcases missing. No note at all. She was thirteen years old.
THE CIPHER Perhaps she was better at creating a fog around herself than even she realized. The others, Murdock, Kai, Allen, and Quinn, they’d left enough clues littered across the global communications infrastructure that one could re-create their stories. Explicate their lives with a careful reconstruction of surveilled conversations, location data, purchases, archived social media, search histories, and access to every digital keystroke they’d ever produced, from old high school research papers and blogs they kept as teenagers, to anonymous tweets from fake accounts, to childhood diaries haphazardly left in old Microsoft Office files. And yet Shane had left so little evidence of herself, all of it having to be pieced together from the trails of the others, it was almost like her life didn’t truly begin until 2014 when she walked into a restaurant for breakfast. These snippets of an opaque working-class American childhood lack crucial detail. There are gaps. There is her rage and intelligence and a fevered sense of injustice, but her core story remains unknowable and maddeningly out of reach. Here following is what is known of the conclusion to her life as Shane Acosta. Past this point, the darkness thickens.
A shrink might tell her it was easy enough to draw a line between her dad’s death and her chosen way of life, but she didn’t start hating the oilmen until much later when she began dabbling with radical boyfriends and deep ecology. Then she looked around at her family’s cancer-alley lives, the sacrifice zone she’d called home, where the sun was a hazy red dragon breathing through the spires of refinery architecture, and she went hard for a few years at drinking and drugs herself. Maybe she just wanted to know what her mom had chosen over her.
Maybe she’d be dead if she hadn’t gone south. She saw the village where her mother came from. She met true revolutionaries. She stared at dark surf on beaches of the Southern Hemisphere and began to dream. She came home and found like minds. They schemed and plotted, and they laid the groundwork for a resistance unlike anything their empire had ever seen.
And in the summer of 2016, Shane read about a protest in North Dakota where thousands of people had gathered to stop an oil pipeline.
* * *
The next morning, Shane drove her truck up to one of the last open big-box stores and bought paper, an envelope, rubbing alcohol, latex gloves, and the cheapest VR set she could find. She thought long and hard about what to write without a code and keystone, though the odds of this letter being intercepted were small. Finally, she settled on: Leadership has steered us wrong. They may want more than we want. Proceed with caution at their requests. She signed it, A Friend of a Bald Friend, addressed it to Coshocton, Ohio, wiped it with alcohol, and dropped it in a USPS box, hoping the postal service wouldn’t collapse in the next few days.
Next, she drove out to a pleasant seaside overlook where an abandoned house sat, charming and unflooded. She set up her mobile hot spot, pulled the VR set out of its packaging, lowered it over her face, and secured the headphones. She dashed briefly into the Slapdish worlde of HBO’s Egyptian costume drama where avatars of the popular characters milled, fucked, and betrayed, and left a blue silk scarf with a bot playing a shopkeeper. Then she traveled over to her encrypted worlde. It was basically her father’s den from their house in Mississippi: a wood-paneled basement room with a TV casting light over movie posters adorning all four walls. A lot of Clint Eastwood and John Wayne, but of course Alan Ladd as well. She’d even included the cracked door to the laundry room with the familiar sound of both machines tumbling. She’d almost added her mother humming a song, and only then understood the seductive power of virtual reality. She waited half an hour for the figure to materialize across from her.
“In the middle of the day?” Tinkerbell demanded. “I had to say my kid was sick.” She appeared to Shane as a sleek, black humanoid void, her head an oily bulb in the ether, her fingers long chopsticks fiddling on the recliner’s armrests. Shane appeared to her as the same black, leather-suited abscess. Both their voices were disguised by the same flat electronic cadence.
“It couldn’t wait. You’re not going to like it.”
There was a beat as the faceless black avatar gazed at her. “What?”
“I’ve come to believe I’ve lost control of the cell.”
“What does that mean?”
“They’re working behind my back. Our backs.”
“On what?”
“A number of things I’d rather not go into.”
“So I’ve had to trust you all these years, but you can’t trust me?”
“I’m sparing you. So you have a chance to shield yourself.”
“Shield myself from what?”
“The others know about you. That you work on the JTTF.”
“How the fuck do they know that?”
“I told them.”
“Why?” she demanded, the slick black mask lurched forward, menacing her space.
“I needed their trust at the time. The point is, if they’re caught and interrogated—I’m not sure if they’d give you up.” Tinkerbell was silent for a while. “You knew there were risks when we started this.”
“Of course I knew that. Don’t patronize me.” The avatar smeared spindly fingers across its expressionless mask. Somewhere in Colorado, she was wiping away tears. Then she said matter-of-factly, “You want me to stop them.”
“Only if I can’t. I need to get back to Lawrence first.”
“If the governor doesn’t lynch you at the border.”
She shook her head. “What?”
“Your governor. Justis. He declared a state of emergency for the dust storms. He says until The Pastor is inaugurated as president, Kansas will be its own independent nation. He has the Kansas Army National Guard and the League at the state borders running checkpoints. He illegally executed three people on death row last night.”
“What are the Feds doing about it?”
“Got me. No one seems to know who’s in charge at the moment. They have darker paramilitary arms hunting for your people right now too.”
Shane felt a bug land on her neck, and she swatted. The illusion of the VR was suddenly as shallow as the set of a high school play. “We need a way to stop them without putting you at risk.”
“How?”
Shane chewed her lower lip. “The investigation has been close to the bomb maker before, right?”
“The original bomb maker? Yeah. The theory’s come up over and over that whoever’s building the IEDs might have a military background. We usually get a contingent that pooh-poohs this just because bomb making has become so democratized. You go online now and you can find detailed AR-VR instructions that walk you through incredibly intricate ordnance. The theory was harder to ignore after the missile in Anacortes.”
“Could you put a clue in front of someone without drawing attention to yourself?”
She sighed. “He fits the profile: explosives background, single, and they’re looking for someone who travels for work or at least has an excuse to move around the country. Like I told you, he was crossed off our list back in ’30 after the Ohio River Massacre because our algorithms told us he was a right-winger.”
“Find something we can use,” said Shane. “But don’t do anything until I tell you.”
“What are they planning?”
“I’m sorry, I wish I knew.” Shane shook her head. “I lost control of it all.”
The avatar rubbed where her eyes would be. The voice-altering tech drained so much of the sorrow from what she said next. “How did I get here?”
Shane exited Slapdish and pulled the VR set from her head, half expecting her truck to be surrounded by FBI agents. Instead, just a half-bright afternoon, yellow sun cutting through cloud banks and glistening on the water. She’d left the window open, and horseflies buzzed in and out while a garter snake sizzled through the grass. She forced herself to drive the speed limit back to the motel. People had long ago stopped wearing either 6DEGREES OR THE WEATHERMEN on T-shirts. When the five of them started, they had an idea, but that idea did not belong to them. And once others got hold of it, they could mutate it, and pretty soon the program would become how best to scatter blood around. Then one day, very soon, they would all look around, and nothing would be changed, and nothing will have worked, and the dead would still be murdered.
In the motel, she roused Lali and told her to pack quickly. She crammed their clothes into her ancient Osprey, the pack mostly duct tape now. Then they lit out on Highway 49, heading home to Kansas.
* * *
Before Allen and Perry, before Anacortes, La Grange, and Fort McMurray, before the Ohio River Massacre, before Lali was born, before they’d even set off their first bomb, Shane heard about a protest in North Dakota over a pipeline.
These were still early days, just maps, materials, ideas, and codes. Obama still president. Clay Ro had been recruited at this point, but Miles Kroll had not. Energy Transfer Partners was set to build its $3.7 billion Dakota Access Pipeline through the territory of the Standing Rock Indian Reservation right along the Missouri River. An enormous protest erupted in response, with thousands making their way to Sacred Stone Camp, mostly local tribes of the Oceti Sakowin, along with plenty of allies eager to make this fight about more than Indigenous land or the health of the water but a battle over the future of the planet itself. In those days, this was what the movement had settled on: trying to blockade the industrial machine one oil pipeline at a time. Of course, Shane wasn’t there to actually join the protests. ETP had retained the services of a security firm called TigerSwan, which was working with local, state, and federal law enforcement to not only suppress and drive out the protestors but to document them. Everyone who camped out in the pipeline’s path or chained themselves to machinery would be marked for life with a kind of digital scarlet letter and useless to Shane and her comrades.
