Noise: A Novel by Darin Bradley

Author:Darin Bradley
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Fiction, General, Regression (Civilization), Science Fiction, Broadcasting, Suspense, Thrillers, Dystopias, Espionage
ISBN: 9780553386226
Publisher: Spectra
Published: 2010-08-31T13:56:53+00:00

One of the Guards, the one with the nerve-agent cannon, sent two canisters at the Auditorium Building, their basso grunts like hooting owls as their ejecta smokestreamed toward the building. As I’d thought, the agent clouds were cohesive. They vented up into the opened windows, before the wind dispersed them, on the second and third floors, through which Salvage was firing. The break in the firefight bought the Guard a minute to address the girls.

Aleph Party, on Levi’s command, fired the grenade launcher over the Humvee toward the building, between the Guard and Salvage, to divert their attention.

We had to hurry. There might have been another demolitions squad worming through the underground. The Jacks had made enough for several vehicles, but they didn’t know how much would be used. If there was another squad, they’d blow a new hole in the road, taking people down into the darkness to live dead forever with flowers that wouldn’t die. Zunis and Greeks and kids from Slade, trading all the final answers with the oracle. Giving them back, maybe, at Delphi. Asynchronously. Offering answers from the future, when things Collapsed, to the classical ancients waiting patiently to be as intelligent as we were, at twelve years old, in our seventh-grade classroom, reading Mythology and Native Americans.

The answers hadn’t made sense to the ancients because they’d been for us, in the future. They just built meaning from the abstracta. It was a trick psychics used.

Mary was ready. She got the jump. She shot one Guard through the back of the neck when he turned around to flinch at Aleph Party’s exploding cocktail. When he turned around to help other people at all times.

If I could, I would have just made them the offer. To give us what we want, or die. But they would have just killed us. We could … take no chances….

Four grabbed the other Guard’s gun, the one who loaded the RPG and the nerve-agent cannon, just so he couldn’t use it. She wasn’t hurting him, which was Secondary.

The driver slid out of his cockpit, taking a moment to help while Salvage battled the gas in the building. When he turned to shoot Four, to shoot Mary, I ran through the burning-Humvee-smoke-hydra. I emerged from underground, wearing goggles and a respirator from the art section in the bookstore. I wore all-black, was painted black, to be part of the smoke, the power-outage darkness. I was not myself in the tall grass outside the fort.

On the roof, everyone had become Primary. The Jacks opened fire on the gunner in the back of the Humvee. I opened fire on the driver. When Four let go, Mary opened fire on the other Guard. We all brought fire, unbound. Prometheus, every one.

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