“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
“But mostly with the honesty. I like that.”
“Cool,” Berg said. “So anyway, if we’re not going to fuck, I guess I’ll go fuck some shit up now.”
“Okay,” Amber said. “See ya.”
“Coming?”
“No. I mean, yeah, go ahead. Trash that shit. I don’t want to tonight. That’s what’s freedom all’s about, right?”
Berg and Redwood and Salmon met at Berg’s little lab—Berg had a survival tent covered haphazardly in leafy branches on ground level, a camp stove, and a pair of repurposed saucepans. Other things too. He’d come with them, just the month before. Sometimes it takes a bit for the shell of civilization to slough off, but for now he was allowed his technology provided he put it toward the ends of the movement. With Amber’s gasoline and a few bars of shoplifted soap from a Dollar Tree, Berg prepared the napalm. The little pots made for an okay double boiler. Some water was heated in the lower boiler as Berg shaved the soap. Then, off the stove and onto a rock, quick quick before the water cools. The gasoline into the top boiler and then the soap—a 1:1 ratio. A drizzle of gas, a tiny tongue of soap. Stir with a thick twig. Some more gasoline, a handful of soap shavings sprinkled like mozzarella cheese through Berg’s fingers. Stirring and stirring, the liquid grew viscous and thick. Twice more, three potfuls, six Mason jars. Rags dipped in spilled gas. Two jars to a man, held in pockets of military surplus jackets. Salmon had the matches; he kept them in his boot.
They walked to the lip of the highway without a word except for Redwood who said, “Don’t fall down with this shit in your pockets,” and they didn’t. The highway was a target-rich environment. Berg and Salmon took off to the left though Salmon found the first fork onto a service road and walked down it. Redwood to the right. To the Ford dealership, rich with oversized trucks and SUVs. There were some Fusions too, but they’d burn like the rest. To a Starbucks, closed with chairs on the tables. And Redwood, always a bit madder than one should be and taller as well, to a gas station. Shell, those butchers of the Ogoni people, stranglers of the world. An open one, though no cars were at the pumps. Redwood went to the little booth and knocked on the Plexiglas. He had to bend down to make eye contact with the employee, a kid. High school. No stake in the system, even if he didn’t realize it. Redwood had the words FUCK YOU scrawled in oil across his forehead, his cheeks, his nose. There’d be security camera footage and photos, but they wouldn’t be published everywhere at least and the published pics would have to be airbrushed, Photoshopped, and some detail would be lost.
“I’ve got a gun under here,” the kid said. Bored kids are always very interested in potentially getting to shoot somebody.
“You’re going to shoot me for the privilege of staying in a cold plastic box pumping gas for rich bastards for your junk food money?” Redwood asked. “Here, I’ll help you out with that.” A lighter from his left hand pocket, the first jar, an oily rag through the hole in the top from his right, a casual backwards toss and Redwood started running because he heard the crash of broken glass, his long legs taking him out into the road. For kicks, Redwood lit the other rag, threw the second jar behind his back, and ran. Jellied fire spread across two lanes of blacktop faster even than Redwood’s long legs could take him.
In the trees, Amber almost slept to the sounds of helicopters flying low, to the knives of spotlights sweeping through the forest, setting night birds to fly.
When Redwood wasn’t around the next morning, the band decided rather quickly that of course he had been captured by the police and was now being held as a political prisoner in the county lock-up.
“What are we going to do?” Berg asked.
“What do you mean do?” Salmon asked.
“You know, contact sympathizers, hold a demo, do basic prison support work?”
“Ha!” Amber said, “that’s herd thinking, not pack thinking.” Salmon had told her something similar about a month prior, when she wondered if the crew couldn’t liberate extra food during their Dumpster diving expeditions and deliver them to the homeless. We’re homeless, Salmon had pointed out. But we’re a pack, not lone wolves and not a herd.
“Well, what if the pigs come after us, if Redwood tells them about us?” Berg asked. Amber didn’t know what to say to that. “You can’t live a free life in prison, pretty much by definition. I mean if freedom were just an individual subjectivity, you could be ‘free’ taking English literature courses or interning at Google.”
“So? We’re out here trying to be free; we’re not looking to free everyone else, or even anyone else,” Salmon said. “In fact, you’re going to have to face facts, we’ll need a massive population crash in the first place to really experience freedom. It’s civilization and its diseases and wars that’ll bring that about. Our job is to survi—”
“Then why the hell did I napalm half a dozen Hummers last night?” Berg threw up his arms. His voice was birdy and shrill. “With that logic, the best thing I can do for the cause of human freedom is go to work for Exxon or Blackwater, I could—”
The boys argued. Free free free. It was all symbolic thought, Amber realized quickly enough, but underneath the rhetoric was something else. Monkey rivalry. Chest-bumping and displays. Or mating calls, birdsongs. But then the symbolic thought. After that comes the division of labor—we fuck shit up, you stay here. Then agriculture. Domestication of the wolves who comes too close to the fire. Stories of spirits in the wind, of dead ancestors. Scratch out a language on the sides of rocks. Better build a temple. And from there pharaohs and slaves, kings and peasants, CEOs and transfats and Twitter and smokestacks, and we’re all prisoners of civilization. Now the only thing left to do is wonder whether the planet will die in a nuclear holocaust, or if the melting icecaps will drown the soldiers in their ICBM silos first. Amber wandered off, not to her platform, but just to go out deeper into the woods to be really human. What was that line—Running on emptiness. Get out there and be, and don’t think about what “be” means.
Amber heard the police in the woods. They were easy enough to avoid. They stumbled over twigs and leaves, their communication devices crackled and whined. She didn’t bother trying to divine their motives or outthink them. They were just other noises, loud ones to walk away from. Soothing ones beckoned and she found a stream and followed it, feet wet on the rocks, a careful leap over the branch-dams of the beavers. There were smells too, obvious ones. Plastic and cooked meat. Amber had eaten nothing but berries and mushrooms and the occasional hastily stolen Hostess Cupcake jammed into her mouth whole during the latest shoplifting spree. Her stomach growled.
There was a family—little Asian girl in purple with giant boots, white parents in colors they probably didn’t even realize matched the environment. Khaki pants like the dirt of the clearing, green and brown tops. Camouflage by way of accident of demographics and fashion trends. They had tents, fancier than Berg’s, and a camp stove, fancier than Berg’s, and some solar power contraption that was probably also a stove but didn’t seem to work right as the father was hunched over it, and the parents both had the white cords of iPod headphones hanging down their torsos. They were silent. The girl played with leaves, the mother was fuming about something with her chin high and hands on her hips. Amber realized that there should be four, not three. A boy, slightly older, cartoons on his sleeping bag. They weren’t food, they weren’t anyone she could talk to, they weren’t threatening her with violence as the police did simply by existing and by marching through the woods with their sticks and their guns and their dogs, so she left the family behind.