Chaos descends. Information and disinformation collide. The only common language people speak now is violence. Emergency rooms all over the country are flooded with gunshot victims, beating victims, stabbing victims. After the Senate bombing, cars and trucks become weapons, bats, boards, frozen water bottles launched from T-shirt guns. Individuals aggregate, become crowds, human mobs drawn outdoors by outrage and fear. The time for talking has passed. Reports from the street echo reports from other streets. Face-offs between men and women screaming into one another’s open mouths under a summer swelter to accept reality. But what is reality, if not conflict?
Heads are broken, bodies blown apart, injuries rarely seen outside of war zones. Ambulances fight the crowds, racing toward emergency rooms, but the hospitals are already filled with failed suicides, jumpers with broken bones, drug overdoses, and self-asphyxiators forever muffled by brain damage. And now we are forced to ask, did they know what was coming, these first movers? Is that why they jumped? Is that why they swallowed the pills and fired all those guns into their own minds? Did they see the fall before it happened? Some animals are more attuned to disaster, after all, like birds startling from the trees before the earthquake hits.
And all the while the fires grow.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to work. They told us we had more time, that the fossil fuels we burned would cause damage in the future. But there are ice squalls in Texas now and heat waves in Siberia. Time itself is breaking down, our linear concept of a warmer future, of the storms to come, because the storms are here now. The heat is here now, making it simultaneously the present moment but also the hothouse future. Models of prediction teeter on the verge of pointless, for the Chaozoic era has arrived. The end of history. Not humanity’s demise, but the end of the chronological story of a human species carving civilization from its animal past.
Down on the streets the words law enforcement lose their meaning, as badges surrender their power to convince and dominance becomes a matter of ballistic superiority. Soldiers turn on soldiers. Children throw punches in schoolyards across the continent. The Manichean battle between good and evil has arrived, with no clarity regarding who is good and who is evil.
Behold the war of pure noise.
For a while the world made sense. What was good or bad was quantifiable. We could look to the past and see our mistakes, the places we could excel. The quality of life overall improved year by year, decade by decade. For a while the goals were clear, but then the ground began to shake and all the savvy birds took flight.
Louise
Louise is bored, but then waiting has never been her strong suit, the patience it takes to save your pennies and bide your time. It’s August 17, and she and Duane are in a Motel 6 outside San Bernardino. A shithole, Louise calls it, filled with methheads and crack whores. They have driven west from Texas, moving only at night, subsisting on a diet of Cheez-Its and Sprite. They don’t talk about what happened, about Story’s face in the Valkyrie’s window as the black SUVs roared in, and how she met Louise’s eyes, while Louise—who had gone off for a private pee—was hiding in the trees. They don’t talk about the surgical precision of the strike team that pulled Story from the van and had her in the back of an SUV disappearing down the road in a cloud of dust thirty seconds later, or how the last one to leave put two shotgun slugs into the van’s engine block and left it for smoking dead.
For the first day they didn’t talk about anything, moving cross-country on foot, staying away from roads and houses. As far as they knew, there was an all-points bulletin out for their arrest. At a gas station in Alpine, they stole a pickup truck with its keys tucked in the driver’s-side visor. Duane drove in silence, radio off. He felt what Louise felt, the guilt of those who have survived when others have not.
They switched vehicles in Arizona, hot-wiring an ancient Buick LeSabre outside a Walmart. During the day they slept in the shade under the car, pulling off the road and down into a gulley or ravine. They had no plan. This wasn’t the fail-safe. It was flight. When they reached California, the storms moved in, ominous clouds crackling with lightning, scissoring the sky. The scale of it jolted them from their reverie, the cloud ceiling dropping, high pressure pushing down, making their teeth itch. They headed south at Victorville, dropped down through the San Gabriel Mountains, as fires ignited the hills around them—emergency vehicles racing by in the other direction—and then the sun was rising and Duane couldn’t drive anymore, so they pulled into the Shithole 6.
They eat Doritos from the vending machine, sitting on the industrial carpet.
“Are you in love with Simon?” Duane asks her.
She searches for the darkest nacho cheese Dorito, the one coated with the most powder, and presses it to her tongue. A sensation moves through her, not exactly taste, but an intense mouth experience that makes her salivate in the chemical simulation of flavor.
She closes her eyes. “Are you?” she says.
He drinks his Diet Coke. Through the wall they can hear the throb of death metal.
“He’s fifteen,” he says.
“So? What are you?”
“Nineteen.”
She makes a whatever face.
“You think he likes you?” she says.
Duane shrugs, then sniffs the air.
“Do you smell smoke?” he says.
“The world is on fire.”
He nods. She finishes the bag, crumples it up, throws it over the bed.
“You think he’s dead?” she asks.
Duane shakes his head.
“I think they’re all dead,” says Louise. “Or tortured somewhere in a dungeon.”
“He has a dungeon?”
“He’s a wizard. Of course he has a dungeon. Or maybe just a dungeon room with, like, whips and chains and a dildo iron maiden.”
“Is that where he took you?”
“No, with me he liked the schoolgirl act.”
In the next room what sounds like a mosh pit has started up. It’s 10:30 in the morning. Duane finishes his Coke, crumples the can, shoots for the trash can.
“Nice shot,” she says, as it rattles off the rim.
Duane rubs his eyes. Sleep is coming for him. “You really think he’s dead?”
Louise gets up, goes to the bathroom. She strips off her shirt. “I’m gonna take a shower,” she says, then turns suggestively. “Coming?”
He shakes his head.
“Wow,” she says. “You really are in love.”
She kicks the door closed. Ten minutes later, when she comes out wrapped in a towel that smells like bleach, he is fast asleep on the carpet.
*