Bewere the Night

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.

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.