The sun had moved into the orange of afternoon when Amber heard the yawp and the thrashing about that attracted her attention next. It had been hours, though she wasn’t aware of the passage of time except when the shouting brought her back into the world of symbolic thought, and then only because it was so ironic. If there was anything at all left of humanity after tens of thousands of years of civilization and symbol-making that could be considered real and pure and true, it was a scream of fear. A boy’s voice, broken like a girl’s from shock and rage, and then there were echoes. Responses. A woman’s voice shrieked, “Jeremy!” and the woods grew restive.
Amber had heard screams before. When Salmon had twisted his ankle. When Redwood and her were up on her platform fucking like wolves. The day before Berg had found the pack, when he was tramping through the forest shouting both parts of the fight with his father that had sent him into the woods with his camping gear and a dog-eared copy of Future Primitive. He screamed again when Salmon had torn it apart in front of his face. But this scream was different. It hadn’t been swallowed up by the echoless trees and hills. The police were alive in the woods now, shouting again through megaphones and amplifiers. The woman couldn’t stop shrieking Jeremy! The little girl was whooping too, like a bird.
Amber didn’t even mean to walk toward the first scream—why would she? But she strode right into it. Not in a clearing, but in a tight clump of the thick-trunked trees, where the woods were dark. And she saw the boy. And the boy held a stick. And at the end of the stick was much of an eye. And just a foot or so beyond the tip of the stick was Redwood, his face wrinkled and brown like bark, a gouge where his eye had been, his lipless mouth open wide. He gasped when he saw Amber, and Amber’s knees buckled from the stench of cooked meat. The boy dropped the stick and his smile and ran. Amber vomited into her hands. Redwood tried to talk but the scream was all he had. He keened, a lung pushing air through a scored and warped tube of flesh. In his remaining eye was a message. A glare. Amber noticed that his eyelashes, which she always liked because they were long like she was always told a girl’s should be, were gone.
Amber had gone back for her journal, and that is what saved her. Despite the copter and the chain of police and volunteers—mostly portly militia types with barely legal firearms slung uselessly across their backs—marching in a long single file across the woods, she was huddled on her platform and missed. The boys had been picked up. Arson. Redwood was dead, or probably was anyway. There was nothing to keep her. The next morning she dropped from her platform, cut off her dreds with a sharp rock, and moved into town. There were enough crusties on the street to blend in with and she was a pretty girl, even with a haircut by hack. The city was easy. Dumpster dive behind the yuppie supermarket, wash in the library, spread for someone when it rained, and huff and write in her journal with her eyes closed. She showered a lot, standing in a puddle of black water, till she smelled like soap, smelled like Berg.
It was hard for Amber to get used to talking all the time, to street signs and clothing with logos on them. The world was a huge advertisement for itself, and it stank.
Amber spent most of her days outside the county courthouse in the part of town that was all pillars and thick slabs of concrete from the old days, and littered with the homeless and ratty fast food joints from the now. She was a protestor, though the sign she held up was incomprehensible. She chanted, with the few other people who had rallied around Salmon and Berg, “Free Berg!” was a popular chant, and someone on an acoustic guitar had come up with some new lyrics to the old Lynyrd Skynyrd song. They had destroyed some property, but not very much, and hadn’t hurt anyone. Even Redwood had only hurt himself.
A thin man with significant sideburns asked Amber if she wanted to check out a copy of PW. Amber opened her mouth to tell him no when she saw the little Chinese girl, her knees high as she climbed the steps to the courthouse. She was on a leash and holding it was the mother. The father was there too, his hand clamped hard on the wrist of the boy who had once held a stick that had once been tipped with a man’s eye.
“Yeah, please,” she said.
The guy sidled up to her and opened to a two-page spread. “I wrote this article,” he explained. “It’s about how we, you know, reject anti-civ anarchism as fundamentally playing into the hands of the capitalists.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, it’s just giving up the fight. Individual acts of terror just bring state repression, and the fact is that we have seven billion people on this planet. If we all lived like hunter-gatherers, there would be a huge population crash. The only reason the bourgeoisie keeps the proletariat alive is because they don’t want to do any work themselves, and—”
Amber grabbed the paper. “Thanks. I’ll read it myself.”
“Okay, well we have meetings too … ” he reached into his messenger bag for a leaflet. Amber grinned inside. The local socialists were still a revolving door of stupid freshmen—she knew this shtick down cold.
“And that’s a dollar, by the way.” He tapped the edge of the paper. “What kind of socialist sells a newspaper?” Her eye wandered to the parking lot.
He nodded. “Yeah, well, see. The paper isn’t free. We live under capitalism, after all, and the printing press isn’t a worker collective, yet. Plus, when you just give out papers for free people don’t read them. When they pay a dollar, and some people even pay five to support the movement—”
“Look asshole, I’m not paying you a fucking dollar!”
He tried to grab the paper back but he was weak and Amber strong. She darted away from him and grabbed his messenger bag. “Paper for the people!” Amber shouted, and she flung the bag in the air. It rained copies of Proletarian Worker and then she kicked the socialist right in the knee, making his leg buckle. The other protestors cheered and then the cops, always itching for a chance to use their truncheons, were on them, but Amber was already gone.
Amber wasn’t worried. She wasn’t hopeful either. She was wedged in the hatch area of the SUV, one much nicer than civil servants could afford, and whose hood was hot to the touch. Unlocked too. Careless parents, the parents of that Chinese girl, of the boy with the stick. Had Amber been thinking, she would have even thought herself clever for showering and taking care of herself these past few days—surely she would have smelled like rotten wood and ripe human and filled the vehicle with fumes otherwise. Stink lines rising from the top of cartoon garbage can. She took a deep breath. Nothing but flowers. Not even a thought. No thought, no obstacles. Amber was beyond good and evil now, beyond boredom and engagement for that matter. She had her journal and the moon was full even as the sun still stood over the horizon. Plenty of light, but even she couldn’t read what she had written in her time living outside. There was something in those glyphs and strokes though, something older the words, older than symbols. Just what she had been wanting all along.
The family was sedate when they got in the car. The boy—Jeremy, but Amber didn’t think things like “Jeremy” now—wasn’t with them anymore. It didn’t matter. The drive seemed long. The sun had gone down and the moon sailed away, as if Amber was being taken around the curve of the world, away from the city and into the woods. But the trees she saw out her window were slaves of lawns, Holocaust survivors forced forever to mourn for their brethren whose bodies made their own coffins. Homes. McMansions. The car parked. The parents got out and collected the sleeping little girl from her car seat and took her away. The girl stared at Amber but didn’t say anything.