If standing in a park moments after getting shot at felt weird, touching in to get on a bikeshare felt even weirder. But after walking a couple of blocks in the smoke, I realized that I was in a race between how long I had to spend outdoors and how hard I had to work while I was out there, and decided that I was going to have to ride if I was going to make it up to the Burbank hills and back again without rendering myself so lung-sick that I wouldn’t be able to fight when I got back to the house.
With Gramps’s guns.
I stuck to the sidewalk for the first two-thirds of the trip, but when I got to the steep uphills where the sidewalks petered out, I rode nervously on the shoulder, hugging as close as I could to the curbs, but then I dismounted and walked the bike—as soon as I hit that steep slope and started breathing hard, it was like someone had filled my lungs with broken glass. I only got passed by a single car, semiautonomous and lidar-guided. It gave me a wide berth.
The ash from the fires, the rains, and the sunshine had turned the flood zone into a weed-choked riot of shrubs, scrub, and grasses, and for a while I thought I wouldn’t be able to find my cache. But then I found the fence line and walked it carefully, squinting through my goggles, wheeling the bike, then leaning the bike down in the weeds and hacking my way to the cistern. It was smaller than I remembered.
The top layer of sandbags had been exposed to successive waves of rain and sun and the fabric had started to disintegrate. Many of the bags split as I tossed them into the brush. Then, as I remembered, a layer of rocks. What I hadn’t remembered was how heavy they were. How had I lifted these into the cistern? The sand from the leaking bags had infiltrated the spaces between the rocks, turning into a dry cement that sucked at them as I wrestled them free. Then there were more sandbags, these ones intact, damp, and heavy.
And then my fingers scrabbled over the slick plastic of the contractor bag. It was slimy from the water that had seeped through the sandbags, and therefore slippery, and it was big, but I got it free and used my key-ring knife to slice through the tape. There were two more layers of bags inside of it, slice, slice, and then I was looking at Gramps’s guns.
* * *
The wireless up in the hills was too janky for an anonymizing tunnel. I used the most performatively privacy-respecting Baby Google—Duck Duck Goog—to search a tutorial on how to operate an AR-15. The clips were full, and I laboriously assembled and disassembled one gun, just so I knew how to do it. Then I used the roll of tape and the extra contractor bags I’d stashed in the cache bag to rewrap everything and created a cross-body sling for it all. It was awkward and it weighed a ton, but I’d be going downhill.
I rode the bike brakes cautiously down the steep parts, nearly falling off on the first three corners as my arsenal swung wide and dragged my center of gravity way out. Then the plastic started to tear and I had to dismount and cocoon the whole thing in tape.
I was bathed in sweat by the time I hit the lowlands, eyes so swollen and red I could barely see, breathing in ragtime, head swimming. I pumped at the pedals like my legs were made of wood. And attached to someone else’s body. I kept trying to wipe the sweat out of my eyes and punching myself in the goggles. The skin around my eyes was already sore from weeks in goggles. Each smack in the face was a fresh outrage.
Pocket-buzzes from my screen reminded me that I’d descended into civilized zones where the wireless was strong. I wheeled the bike into a 7-Twelve, trash-bag-o’-guns smacking into my hip, and bought a huge bottle of ice-cold black licorice kombucha and guzzled it outside the store, not caring that it sluiced down my face and chest. My shirt was already soaked through.
As the kombucha soothed my throat and cooled off my core, I had a moment of disembodiment, this picture of myself as seen from above, soot-streaked, sweat-soaked, panting, half blind, armed to the teeth, carrying enough gold to buy a two-bedroom condo in my neighborhood. What the actual fuck was I doing? I should be calling the police—there was no way I was going to go in there with guns blazing. God, how much time had I wasted already?
I had to call the cops now. Could I call the cops now? What about the guns? I could just stick them in a trash can, I guess, or admit to them, say that I knew that Gramps had cached them and I’d gone for them and then thought better of it … It would be messy, but the DSA had good lawyers. Hell, I had enough gold to pay for my own lawyer.
I shook my head. What had I been about to do? Jesus. I got out my screen and got ready to call the cops, and just as I was about to hit send, an alert popped up. Ana Lucía was calling me.
“Ana Lucía? Where are you? Are you okay?”
She looked worse than me, no goggles, eyes streaming, a big bruise on her cheek and a fat lip. “I got out,” she said. “I got out and I ran. I’m by the high school. The one you went to. Big football fields?”
“You’re at Burroughs?” We were basically across the street from each other.
“Yes, that’s it. Where are you?”
“I’ll be there in two minutes. What do you need? Food? Drinks? Goggles?”
“Yes, all of that.” Her voice broke. “Oh, God, Brooks—”
“Just sit tight,” I said. “Two minutes.”
* * *
We sat down at the same picnic table that I’d sat at with Phuong a million years ago, by the climbing wall. She tore open the 7-Twelve bag and sorted through the goodies I’d bought her: a filter mask with integrated goggles (I’d upgraded my own at the same time, because why not?), energy bars from the co-op, more ginger booch, aspirins, and a couple of snap-to-activate cold packs.
She chugged one booch and crumpled the pouch, then cracked the other one and washed down a bunch of painkillers with it, and then peeled the energy bars and gobbled two. Finally, she snapped her mask back over her face, mindful of her bruises, and looked at me.
“Are you hurt?”
“No,” I said. “How about you?”
“Superficial,” she said, pointing at her face. “Mostly just my lungs. After they’d started shooting, we all surrendered. None of us wanted to take a chance. They took all our masks and herded us into a room on the third floor, posted a guard. They bickered constantly. And streamed. They have a big audience of crazy people out there, and they kept calling on them to ‘rise up, rise up, take back America,’ and do more of these stupid so-called arrests. That was another thing they fought over, how to arrest us, like what words they had to read us, like they were playing some weird RPG where they had to get the words right or it wouldn’t be a real arrest.”
“Arrests?”
“Yeah, that whole ‘sheriff’s deputies’ thing. I’d run into that bullshit before, some weird conspiracy about ‘sovereign citizens,’ a complete delusion.”
“But they weren’t actually deputies? Like LA County cops?”
She chuckled. “Of course not. Those idiots? No, no way.” She paused. “Actually, a couple of them really talked like cops, so maybe they were cops of some kind, but not the kind they said they were, if that makes sense.”
“Not really.”
“Yeah, okay, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Maybe it makes sense to them. I think there were three groups there: the ones who really believe in this whole sovereign-deputy conspiracy and think they’re actually following the law; the ones who don’t give a shit about all that nonsense and just want to murder our asses; and then there’re the toddlers with the shitty diapers, the little boys who were just in it because they hero-worshipped the other ones and didn’t really think anyone would go through with it. They scared me the most, because they had no idea what was going on but they still had lethal weapons.”
“How’d you get out?”
“Broke the toilet. Then they had to start escorting us next door for piss-calls, and when that started to interfere with their streaming, they got fed up and decided to move us to another apartment. I waited until we were in the hallway by the fire escape and I jumped out the window.”
“You—”
“I’d installed those windows and I knew they were designed to pop out if you hit them in the top corners to make it easy to get out in an emergency, so I just ran for it, hammered those releases and followed the window out full-body, like surfing on it. It turned into little glass cubes when it hit the scaffold landing, and I rolled over them and just kind of tobogganed down the stairs, dived off the next landing, hopped the fence, and disappeared into the smoke.”
“Ana Lucía, Jesus Christ, you could have killed yourself.”
“Yeah, and they could have killed me too. They tried, with those squirt guns—the guys with the rifles were downstairs, thankfully. That’s why I made my break when I did. But Brooks, those guys are going to end up killing everyone, eventually. They’re ready to be martyrs, and they just want to take some of us with them when they go.”
“Fuck,” I said. “What about Phuong?”
Even with the mask, I could tell she was frowning. “She thought it was a mistake to run. We talked about it and she said no, she said to wait for the cops, that you’d get them and we’d get loose.”
“We gotta call the cops then.” I remembered my moment of clarity outside the 7-Twelve.
“Any kind of standoff is going to get our people killed. They don’t want to get out, Brooks. They kept saying, ‘Waco meant something, Malheur didn’t.’ You know what that means? It’s two stupid armed standoffs with the cops and right-wing militias. Waco was the one where nearly everyone died, along with a bunch of noncombatants, mostly kids. Malheur was the one where practically nobody died and then a judge let them all walk free. These guys want to go to Valhalla, not court.”
She lifted up her mask and swiped away the tears standing in her red eyes. “Brooks, I think they’re going to kill everyone in that building, and then themselves.”
* * *
I’m not sure what happened right after that. It was like my hearing and vision just … went away, replaced by a kind of hissing white noise and fog, as my overloaded brain processed what I’d just heard.
Then I was back, at the table, in the smoke, sitting opposite Ana Lucía, and in my hands was the taped-up contractor bag that was full of Gramps’s guns. I was gripping it so hard my hands hurt.
“Brooks? Are you okay?”
My brain had recovered from its vapor lock and now it was running at triple speed, plans and counterplans slotting in so quickly and surely that I felt almost like a spectator at someone else’s strategy meeting.
“Brooks?”
“We know that building. We built that building. We can get in and out in ways that no one else can. I know which windows can be removed, I know where there’re HVAC access panels, I know where the breakers are and how to flood the whole fucking place. If we want to get into that place, they can’t stop us.”
She shook her head, her face unreadable behind the mask, her body language unmistakable. She thought I was out of my mind. She might have been right, but I was right, too: this was the only way.
“I don’t understand, Brooks. We get inside to do what? They have guns. Big guns.”
I got out my pocketknife and slit the plastic.
She lifted her mask again, holding the disassembled rifle pieces up to her face, turning them this way and that, until she started to cough and reseated the mask. “Hijo de—” I passed her one of the clips and then a box of ammo. “Holy. Fucking. Shit.” She clicked the rifle together carefully, did a thing with the slide that seemed competent and safety oriented, squinted at one part and then another. “Where the fuck did you get these?”
“It’s my inheritance.” I laughed and it sounded weird and angry. “My grandfather had these stashed under the floor.” I had a sudden realization. “That day I met you, riding on my bike? I was coming back from stashing them in the hills. I’d just found them and I didn’t want them in the house.”
“But you didn’t want to turn them in to the police, either?” She’d found the krugerrands and was turning them over in her hands. Even in the smoky half-light, they had a rich, dull gleam. She hefted them in one hand and then the other. “These are—”
“My grandfather had a lot of weird ideas,” I said. I hadn’t thought about the gold in months, and even when I’d recovered it from the cache, it had just been another thing to pack up and sling. Now, looking at it, thinking about what it could buy, seeing it in Ana Lucía’s callused hands with her bruised thumbnail, I had two absolutely contradictory feelings at precisely the same moment: That’s my gold, give it back and what the hell would I do with a small fortune in gold? And then, just as quick, Phuong could be dead soon, why am I even thinking about gold?
She put them down on the table with a deep thunk that I both heard and felt. “How many of these are there?”
“A little over two hundred. Most of them are rolled and wrapped, but there are a few loose in there.”
She stared at the coins for a moment and then swept them back into the bag. Then she took one out again. “Do you know how long my parents would have had to work to earn these?”
“I’ve got an idea,” I said. “I figure this is a sizable portion of Gramps’s pension savings, plus whatever else he could liquidate. I don’t know what those guns go for, but they’re probably almost as valuable, ounce for ounce.”
“Not quite,” she said. She got out the pieces for one of the AR-15s and looked around. We weren’t visible from the street, and the smoke meant that even people in the school would see us as only blurs. Moving with sure, economical motions, she snapped the gun together, looking just as competent as the guy in the video I’d watched.
“You’ve done that before, huh?”
“Country girl,” she said. “Out in the San Joaquin Valley, everyone knows someone who’s got a couple long guns cached somewhere. I had a friend growing up who knew where her dad kept his guns. We watched all these old movies about it, practiced putting them together blindfolded.”
“Why?” I blurted. Like the gold, the guns hadn’t been real until I saw them in her hands. Watching her handle the rifle, it seemed unimaginably dangerous, like a nuclear bomb.
She pulled up her mask again. Her eyes were red, furious. “Why? Brooks, why? Because, asshole. Because this is why. Because there are a lot of angry white guys out there who would rather see me dead of smoke inhalation than share their city with me. Because I’m only useful if I’m picking crops or cleaning someone’s house, and if I’m not willing to settle for that, there’s an army of these guys out there, and they’ve got guns. An army, Brooks, an army.”
I looked away. “I don’t want to kill anyone.”
“Me either,” she said, and pulled her mask down. “But if someone is going to die, it’s not going to be me.”
I almost stood up and walked away then, but then I thought of Phuong. If it was me, she wouldn’t hesitate. Would she?
Now Ana Lucía was exploring the rest of the bag, unwrapping the weird semirigid fabric wraps that had been around the guns, but that I’d been unable to get perfectly back into place. “Body armor,” she said.
“Shit, is that what that is?”
Even with the mask, I could tell that she was making a face at me. “Brooks, come on, be serious.”
“I’m serious,” I said. “I mean, when I found the guns and the gold, they kind of ate my brain, everything else was just kind of … blurry. Like if you saw a plane crash and then someone asked you whether it was cloudy out that day.”
She unwrapped and unfolded it and as she did, I understood the topology: it was a vest with plates that fit into pockets. In my defense, Gramps had removed a bunch of plates and doubled them up in some of the pockets. And even Ana Lucía struggled a little with which plate went where, but after a minute or two of Tetris, she had two fully operational battle rattles, and she pulled one of them on and awkwardly tabbed the Velcro together under her armpits to hold it in place.
“Here,” she said, handing the other one to me. It was lighter than I’d guessed it would be, and I had to take off my mask to get it over my head, and Ana Lucía helped with the Velcro. But once it was on and I was holding a rifle—assembled and checked over by Ana Lucía, who made me work the safety three times before she took her hand off it—I felt embarrassingly badass. “This is ridiculous,” I said, turning this way and that to see how it felt.
She had been getting herself sorted out, distributing spare clips around her armor’s pockets, adjusting the straps, checking the rifle over. She turned and, well, “posed” isn’t the right word, but there are only so many ways you can stand in body armor with a giant assault rifle and all of them have become tropes, visual staples of adventure movies. The thing is, she looked terrifying, like a warrior-goddess, like she had assumed an aspect that she had always been poised to embody.
I thought about her girlhood, the sickness and the terror, the humiliation, and her friendship with the girl she’d gone shooting with, who taught her how to handle a firearm. To be totally honest, I couldn’t imagine what that must have been like. Here I was, picking fights, giving away my house—she hadn’t had any choice in the matter. And to come through it as an organizer, pulling together your neighbors for weeks of marching, and then getting stranded in a city that reneged on its promise of refuge. For a moment, I had a flash of an inkling of a hint of what she might be feeling then, and it did something to me.
In that moment, it all swirled together: that day my mom didn’t wake up, the years of being screamed at and belittled by Gramps, the threats and humiliations, the hope snatched away again and again, and above it all, the thought of Phuong in that building we’d built, held at gunpoint by suicidal, Maga-addled would-be murderers playing “sheriff.” I knew that they’d get away with it: either they’d die as martyrs and inspire other killers to do the same, or they’d make it out and be heroes with their legal bills covered by laundered cryptocurrency from the Flotilla’s plutes.
These were the people who’d spent half a century telling us that we didn’t need to do anything about climate change, and the next half century telling us it was too late to do anything about it. Where we had confronted the vast, destructive forces they’d set in motion and decided to meet them head-on, they wanted to retreat, head for high ground, leave the rest of us behind.
Ana Lucía was looking hard at me, holding her gun, warrior queen, avatar of destruction.
My body armor no longer felt stiff. It felt magical, a hard layer that would let me stand up to these men who wanted to take my love, my building, my future, and my world. I’d been prepared to coexist with these monsters. They insisted that it had to be me or them. It would not be me.
I slid the rifle’s safety off and on, adjusted the shoulder strap, double-checked the ammo clip and the spare clip Velcroed to my vest, and nodded at Ana Lucía.
“All right,” I said.
“All right,” she said.
* * *
The smoke covered us as we crept along Clark, off the main road. My feet felt spring-loaded; the rasp of my breath under my mask was deafening, a whole world of white noise. My vision had irised down to a narrow aperture, centered on Ana Lucía’s back as she glided along the sidewalk.
We circled around Gramps’s neighbor’s house and slipped through a hole in the fencing around the new building, one that we knew about but the Magas didn’t. I almost laughed. How could they think to defend themselves in a fortress I had built, whose every flaw and secret I knew intimately?
For example, I knew which corner of the lot could not be seen from any of the building’s windows, because all the windows that looked down on it were frosted glass in the bathrooms. Ana Lucía and I padded up to it. From there, we could crawl around the building’s perimeter to the HVAC intake on the left and the unlocked patio doors on the right. Ana Lucía and I communicated in terse whispers, deciding that she would have an easier time with the smaller HVAC grille, while I’d take the patio doors. Once that decision was made, all that was left was to hug. It was a long, hard hug, our body armor rubbing together, masks clunking. I didn’t care. All I cared about was this brave woman, this comrade of mine, who was going in with me to save my future and the love of my life.
“I love you, Ana Lucía,” I whispered.
“I love you too, Brooks,” she said, and squeezed me harder.
Finally, we had to let go. We maneuvered our rifles around the front of us and got our hands on them. Ana Lucía hissed: “Three. Two. One—”
But before she could say “GO!” I heard a person turn the corner behind me. I whirled and—
Nearly blew Phuong’s chest open. I actually tightened my finger on the trigger, seeing her eyes widen, her mouth open, and for a moment, I thought I’d just murdered my lover, when my brain realized that though I was squeezing my trigger and aiming my gun, nothing was coming out of it.
The safety was on.
I gasped and dropped to my knees, the world reeling around me. Two simultaneous thoughts—You just murdered Phuong Petrakis and You almost murdered Phuong Petrakis—chased each other around and around in my mind. Someone roughly grabbed my gun away from me and I let them have it. Then, the same hands took my mask, and I reached for it, too late, and I heard Phuong gasp in just the same way I had, then say my name.
“Brooks,” she hissed. “Jesus fucking Christ, Brooks.” She dragged me to my feet and we embraced, clinging to each other like we were afraid it would all be taken away from us. People moved around us and I gradually became aware that it wasn’t just Phuong that had come around the corner, it was a whole group of people.
“You got out?” I whispered in her ear. My eyes were streaming and my nose and throat burned from the smoke, but I didn’t care.
“We all got out,” she said. “And they don’t know it. Let’s get the fuck away from here, fast.”
We got to the neighbor’s property line and paused only to stash the guns and body armor behind a cracked prefab slab that had arrived defective and been set aside for rehabilitation. Then, choking and coughing, we ran up to Verdugo. The public toilets there were still open, and had filtered air.
* * *
Phuong had led the escape. The Magas had all retreated to the ground floor, all except a single guard, Kenneth, who’d been given one of the water pistols full of acid and left behind. After an hour or two, he got terminally bored and distracted, as the guys down on the ground floor sent him the social media martyr videos they were shooting to post when the cops arrived, and she’d snuck up on him with a tack hammer and smashed his wrist, knocking the Super Soaker to the ground and then clamping her hand over his mouth and bearing him to the ground before he could holler. They’d efficiently bound and gagged him with electrical tape, networking cabling, and rags from the jobsite and then gone out the fire exit.
Phuong and the other escapees washed up as they told us the story, eyes glittering, still pumped up from their daring escape. I was excited too, but for another reason. I still couldn’t get over the feeling that had come over me when I’d squeezed the trigger on the rifle at the exact instant that I’d recognized Phuong.
“Are you okay?” she said, patting up and down my arms and shoulders as if checking for a broken bone. “Brooks?”
“I’m—” I couldn’t say it. I started to sob. I wasn’t okay at all. She hugged me, and then Ana Lucía joined, and then it turned into a group hug, some of us crying or just rocking.
Once I disentangled myself, I felt a little more distance and calm. “I’m sorry,” I said, miserably. “It’s just … Phuong, I thought I’d murdered you. If I’d remembered to take the safety off, you’d be dead now. I can’t believe what I almost did.”
She squeezed her lips together. “Where did you get those guns, Brooks? Ana Lucía, they weren’t yours, were they?”
She snorted. “No, Rambo Jr. here had them when I ran into him.”
“Where the fuck did you get guns, Brooks?”
I told her as quickly as I could, explaining about Gramps’s cache, my decision to hide the guns rather than hand them in, the Magas’ obsession with recovering their ordnance, which I thought probably antagonized them into their raid.
“No,” she said flatly. “That wasn’t it. They are angry about everything, Brooks—the construction, the refugees, losing your gramps’s house, all of it. They’re convinced that they’re an endangered species, the last free people in America, and they’re just furious that no one else can see it.
“And now we’ve got a problem. I was thinking that once we got away from the building we could call the cops. Without us there, they’re the hostages, holed up with no leverage to stop the cops from moving in. They don’t get a long, armed standoff, they’ll just get droned or blown up or shot if they don’t surrender.
“But now there’re the guns, with yours and Ana Lucía’s fingerprints all over them. Whatever happens between the cops and those assholes, the cops are bound to find them, and when they do—”
“Shit,” I said. “God, I feel like such an asshole.”
“Not gonna lie,” Phuong said, “all that bullshit with the guns was an asshole move from the very start. You should have turned them in as soon as you found them.” She looked pissed.
“It’s simple,” Ana Lucía said. “We just sneak back over there, clean the guns and armor down, retreat, call the cops, and wait. Those dumbasses are already fully tooled up, it’s not going to be hard for the cops to attribute any additional guns they find lying around to them.”
We all let that sink in. Phuong broke the silence: “That’s a good plan,” she said.
“It’s a good plan,” I agreed. “I’ll sneak over and wipe everything down, meet you back here, and then we’re good to go.”
Phuong held up her hands. “You’ll go? Why you?”
I was ready. “The fewer of us who go over, the less chance we’ll attract attention. Most of us don’t have masks, but I have this amazing one I bought at the 7-Twelve.” I hefted it.
“Fine, so give it to me and I’ll do it. Why should you take all the risk? Is this some weird thing about it being your grandfather’s house so you have to do this work?”
“No,” I said. “It’s some weird thing about me knowing where I hid the third gun.”
“The third gun?” She looked a little angry and a little bemused. It was one of her very best expressions.
“There were three rifles but only two of us. The third gun is in a taped-up plastic bag I stashed on the way in.” Along with a fortune in gold, I realized. Truth be told, I’d forgotten about that third gun until I’d needed an excuse to go back on my own, because yeah, I did have some weird thing about it being my grandfather’s house.
Ana Lucía nodded. “That’s right.”
Phuong made a fake-mad face, which was another of her very best expressions. She had a lot of those.
“Go,” she said. “Be quick. If it looks dangerous, pull back here. Don’t risk anything. I’d rather explain your unlicensed guns than mourn your bullet-riddled corpse.”
“You have a way with words,” I said, trying to keep it light, but when she grabbed me for a fierce goodbye hug, some of that fluttery, terrified feeling I’d had when I’d thought I’d murdered her came back.
* * *
The guns were exactly where I’d left them. I used hand sanitizer and my T-shirt to clean all the guns, working stripped to the waist, methodically, crouched down, in a state of eerie calm.
As I worked, I managed to forget all about the armed men in the building just a few meters away from me. I was too busy turning over a new thought: all my life, I’d felt like a fake. I was supposed to be in the vanguard of the first generation in a century that didn’t fear the future, but I’d always been afraid.
I’d been terrified.
Deep down, I’d always been certain that I would die defending the GND, that I’d be a martyr. It was what happened, wasn’t it? That was what happened to my parents. That was what my grandfather had raised me to expect: a final confrontation, an all-out war, a battle for the future of the human race and its planet. That was what he was planning for, and right up until that moment, as I cleaned off his guns and hid them in the construction waste, I had never really considered the possibility that he’d been wrong. I’d thought there’d be a war with two sides: Gramps’s side and mine. I’d never thought that the real war would be between the people who refused to go to war and the fools who thought they could shoot climate change in the face.
God, I’d been an idiot.
The smoke cleared a little and the building I’d helped build came into sharper focus. It was a beauty, a miracle, a lifetime of dignified shelter for dozens of people, built by dozens of people, in a handful of days.
I crouched there, transfixed, and I realized that for the first time in my life, I genuinely did not fear the future.