Free Noise by Darin Bradley

shadow next to the 1890s door, while Levi did a check around the house. The smoke was only some two or three hundred yards distant. I didn’t hear any shouting from there anymore.
    There was a part of me, the part that had crawled through tunnels between storm drains, that had loved the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in Johnny-come-lately TV syndication, that wanted to step through that smoke, into a land of the dead. To make sense of an underworld utopia. I was in the seventh grade when we read Edith Hamilton’s
Mythology
. The River Lethe, Nepenthe, Cerberus, and Hades. I sometimes confused the Greek and the Roman. I didn’t understand the living fascination with a world of perfected dead.
    The traffic had mostly died. The intersection of Broadway and Sycamore, on the other side of the house next to ours, was filled with smashed, abandoned, and gun-shot cars. It made a good roadblock.
    The new Slade was a quiet one. The delinquents were out of sight.
    “Clear,” Levi reported quietly.
    I nodded from the dark. “All right—get your two hours, then.” Rest in shifts. Just like the night-watch rotation of every Party in every game of every D&D campaign we’d ever played. We usually got bored around sixth level and rolled up a new Groupof characters. Sixth level brought the real power, when you could
do
something with your mages and dwarves. With your paladins.
    Things started to suck with too much power, so we always started over.
    “Two hours,” Levi repeated. He climbed the steps. Looked at the smoke with me for a minute.
    “Girls are eating.”
    I nodded.
    “What do you think about Ruth?”
    I looked at him. “Works metals. Soldering and all that.”
    “That justifies the pain in the ass. I guess.”
    I smiled. “How’d we end up with two lesbians? In this?”
    “Ruth, too?”
    I looked at him funny.
    “Yeah, I guess so.”
    “Yeah.”
    I was fourteen the first time I gamed. I had been invited. Adam and I had a mutual friend from our junior high school, so we met. Adam was the Dungeon Master. I brought Chuck and Jon—
    “You all right?” Levi asked.
    —I played a rogue. I named him Kirn Steelhawk, and he wore masks and took false names. I played well, so I was invited back—Chuck and Jon weren’t. My mom didn’t like that I was playing Dungeons & Dragons. Said it was satanic. Even though I’d just experienced God in the empty sanctuary of our church. I’d convinced myself of this. Desperately. I’d told my youth minister, and we’d all prayed our thanks together.
    I’d even read
Mythology
, so I knew the difference—
    “I’m all right.”
    •   •   •

    Mary lay down next to Levi. In Levi’s room, off the living room. It was smarter for them to rest in the same place. If one heard something, he or she would wake the other. They wouldn’t have to wait on Ruth and me to hear it, too.
    Ruth was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the room, reading the
Book
by the black-and-white light. There didn’t seem to be much coming from Salvage now. I was waiting for a newscast, something stripped from somebody’s still-working digital, but Salvage was just repeating the rules. Being as clever as possible. Now and then, somebody would sign off. A Group on its way out. Clearing the noise.
    I pulled out the earpiece. Let the cats have the rest of the salt-broth in my bowl of ramen. We sometimes added cayenne, just for something different. Not this time. We weren’t wasting spices now.
    Nothing outside the windows when I looked. The same.
    The thing about that book, about
Mythology
, is that, in the backs of our suburban, middle-class, Southern Baptist minds, thinking of dumb, classical ancients and their miraculously ingenious architecture, this was just as good—a different Bible. It was from a time when people didn’t tell sex jokes, or raise taxes, or know what stars were. We thought. They were stripped-down humans, primordial savants making brilliant things, waiting to collect the