by Dan Wells
He thought about robbing the store, but it felt cruel and wrong. That’s not who I am, he thought. I haven’t fallen that far yet.
A light and a siren flared up behind him, and without even thinking Lyle ran.
“Please no,” he muttered, “don’t take me now.” He ducked down an alley and leaped over a body—unconscious or dead he couldn’t tell—and bolted for the far end, hoping to make it over the fence before the police could follow him. He’d never been especially fit, but months of living on the street had made him lean and wiry, and this was not the first fence he’d climbed. The cops were close behind him, but he cleared the fence and leaped down, pelting down the alley and into the street—
—right into the side of an armed soldier.
“Stand down!” the soldier shouted, and Lyle barely had time to orient himself before five soldiers surrounded him in a semicircle, their rifles raised and trained on his chest. “Remove the mask, sir!”
“I’m sorry,” Lyle stammered, taking a step back, “I wasn’t attacking or anything, I was just running—”
“Remove the mask, sir, or we will remove it for you.”
“President Reagan,” said a voice behind Lyle’s back, and a moment later the two cops who’d been chasing him puffed into view. They looked familiar, but Lyle couldn’t place them.
“Please stand down, Officers,” said the leader of the soldiers, “we have this one.”
“We had him first.”
“Sure you did.”
“We’re all on the same team, guys,” said one of the cops. Lyle saw the man’s nametag—Luckesen—and the odd surname sparked a memory. Luckesen and Woolf, the same two policemen who’d arrested him for a house robbery in … It seems like years ago, but it was only, what, March? April? Lyle dropped his head, terrified that they would recognize him, but almost immediately he laughed at the idiocy of the idea. He was crying, too, and blinked the moisture away. They see a dozen or more Lyles every day, he thought. They won’t know me from any of them—and they have no way of knowing I’m the real one.
Both the cops and the soldiers were dressed in what had become the standard urban “armor”: long pants tucked into boots, long sleeves snapped into long gloves, and a helmet with a face shield. No exposed skin. The soldiers were further dressed in thick, armored vests and groin pads, and Lyle remembered just a few months ago seeing that same costume in news footage of soldiers in Africa and Afghanistan. An occupying army, now called home to occupy New York. It was too much, and Lyle felt the tears come harder and hotter.
“He might not even be a Lyle,” said a soldier. “For all you know he hasn’t even done anything.”
“Of course he’s done something,” said Officer Woolf, “he was running. But on the off chance he’s not actually Ronald Reagan, how about we take that mask off. If he’s a Lyle, he’s all yours. Otherwise we take him into the station and figure out what else he’s guilty of.”
“And then we buy him a drink,” said Officer Luckesen, “and congratulate him for somehow avoiding Lylehood.”
“Take it off,” said a soldier. Lyle was still crying, hearing the words without understanding them, and didn’t move. “I said take it off!”
Lyle pulled off the mask, squinting at the sudden influx of light in his peripheral vision.
“No surprise there,” said Woolf. “Have fun with him.”
“Get in the truck,” said a soldier, and gestured with his rifle for Lyle to start walking. The truck was a standard military flatbed, covered with an ad hoc cage of wood and metal and chicken wire. Lyle paused at the back of it, looking up at five other Lyles with sad, desperate faces, crouched in the corners with their arms wrapped around themselves for warmth. I could tell them who I am, he thought. I could tell them I’m the real one, I could prove it to them, and then I’d go to a real prison instead of this hellhole. Almost as soon as he thought of it he discarded the idea. Lyle Fontanelle, the real one, was the cause of all this—the mad scientist who’d destroyed the world. He had to convince them he was somebody else.
“Do you require assistance into the truck, sir?” The soldier’s question was polite and formal, but his voice was a businesslike growl. He was only asking because he had to, and his assistance was not likely to be comfortable.
“I’m fine,” said Lyle, hoisting himself up. “I can do it.” He wandered to the back of the cage and sat down by the others. “So,” he said, trying to think of Lyle-based small talk. “How long have you all been Lyles?”
“Five weeks,” said one. The other four chimed in with time frames of their own, ranging everywhere from ten weeks down to two. The first one looked back at him. “How about you?”
“Way too long,” said Lyle. He took a breath, playing with the mask in his hands. He needed to convince the camp he was one of these men, an innocent bystander accidentally cursed with the face of a war criminal. That would take details, and those details had to sound authentic. He nodded. “Five weeks for me, too,” he said, trying out the story to see how well it fit. He looked up. “How did it happen?”
They told their stories one by one, Lyle listening intently for any information he could use to blend into the crowd. One of them had bought black market ReBirth to try to impress his girlfriend; another one had bought some for his girlfriend, and accidentally gotten it on both of them. “I thought we could be, like, lesbians together, but then we turned into men and I broke up with her.” Two of the Lyles in the truck had originally been women; one had used the lotion to hide from an abusive husband, figuring life as a Lyle was still better than life as a victim. The other just wanted to be taller.
“I never used it at all,” said the last Lyle. He was the one who claimed to have only been a Lyle for two weeks, still halfway through the transformation. He must have been fairly Lyle-ish before—same height, same race, same gender—because the transformation was advanced enough to be easily identifiable. Or maybe we’re all just getting really good at seeing Lyles, thought Lyle.
“Is that really your story?” asked the Lyle One. “You never used it, so you’re not a criminal and they have to let you go? You know that doesn’t work.”
“I never used it,” Lyle Five insisted, shrugging helplessly. “It’s illegal—no offense to any of you—so I never touched the stuff. I was never even tempted. And then one day I just … started changing.”
“That’s not how it works,” said Lyle Two. The one with the Lyle-ized girlfriend. “You probably got it on you and just didn’t notice, like I did.”
“Or somebody put it in the water,” said Lyle Three. “You heard what happened in São Tomé.”
“Those pictures were fakes.”
“That’s just what the liberal media wants you to think.”
“Oh, here we go, a nutjob.”
“Wait,” said Real Lyle. “Maybe it really is in the water. The number of Lyles has ballooned in the last month, exponentially, but the black market availability has dropped off, so where are they getting it? And almost all of the new Lyles have been right here in New York City, so it’s obviously something local. Why not the water?”
“Who would put Lyle lotion into the water?” asked Lyle Five.
“White supremacists,” Lyle Three spat. “Turn everyone in New York City into a white guy, and you’ve just wiped out a massive chunk of blacks, Asians, Latinos, Indians, you name it. They’re whitewashing the whole city.”
“Maybe they did it as some kind of power grab,” said Lyle One. “I mean, like, it’s illegal to be Lyle, right? So if they make everyone Lyle, we’re all criminals and they can throw us all in jail, just like this. Pretty soon the whole country will be a jail, and they’ll control everything.”
“Maybe it was Lyle activists,” said Lyle Four softly, “trying to make Lyles so prevalent no one bothers to hurt them anymore.”
“That’s stupid,” said Lyle Three.
“What if it was an accident?” asked Real Lyle.
The others frowned at him. “Wha
t?”
“What if somebody stole a whole ton of Lyle lotion,” said Real Lyle, “like the stuff that disappeared from the NewYew plant when the government tried to seize it. They tried selling it on the black market, but they didn’t realize it was all Lyle, and when they did they stopped and they dumped it all—flushed it down the toilet, dropped it in a reservoir, whatever. What if somebody thought they were getting rid of it, and poisoned our water supply by accident?”
The group was silent, thinking. After a long moment Lyle Four whispered: “That’s the scariest theory yet.”
“I know,” said Lyle, wrapping his arms tightly around himself for warmth. “I know.”
49
Thursday, November 1
1:15 A.M.
New York
43 DAYS TO THE END OF THE WORLD
The truck eventually dropped them off at a local holding cell, and Lyle spent the night in the gym at a Brooklyn rec center, lying on a cot in a grid of nearly three dozen Lyles. They gave them jumpsuits to replace their old clothes, and almost immediately Lyle lost track of which Lyles were which—they all looked the same, even to him—and decided to just keep to himself instead. Most of the Lyles had apparently decided the same thing. The next morning they joined another group, probably a hundred Lyles in total, and together they were herded into the backs of the flatbed cage trucks for the drive upstate. It was colder on the highway than it had been in the city, and the soldiers issued them blankets to keep warm, though not enough for the group. Lyle didn’t put up a fight and thus never got one; he huddled in the center of the crowd, out of the wind, and tried to stay warm.
Their destination, Lyle noted with surprise, was the old NewYew plant, converted to a Lyle Camp, and he chuckled humorlessly at the irony. The guards were cold and stoic, nearly faceless behind their plastic riot masks, and they backed the trucks up to the front gate one at a time, unloading their cargo of Lyles into the vast open grounds of the camp. Lyle was in the second truck, and waited patiently for his turn, breathing slowly and trying to stay calm. The crowd in the truck thinned, and Lyle practiced the lies he’d concocted. He shuffled to the back of the truck and looked out over the crowd.
Ten thousand Lyles looked back.
“Keep moving,” said a guard, and Lyle jumped down, shocked into silence by the sheer quantity of Lyles. The new Lyles fresh off the truck were herded into a long line, and Lyle fell into place, shuffling forward as each new person was registered. He’d seen enough movies about prison to expect a lot of hooting at the new guys, but the mood instead was somber and clinical. Bored. The ten thousand Lyles in the camp saw the same faces every day, everywhere they looked, and a hundred new iterations didn’t add anything interesting to their world.
The line split, feeding into five smaller lines each with their own clerk, and Lyle soon found himself standing before a large woman with a laptop and an assortment of boxes. “Name?”
“William Shears,” said Lyle quickly.
“Address?”
“Homeless.”
The woman looked up, her expression only barely concealing her disdain for anyone without an answer to such a basic question. “You need an address. Finding out who you really are is the whole purpose of the Amnesty Camp program. Give me the last address you had, and when your number comes up they’ll try to connect you to your old life.”
So they are trying to catalog us, thought Lyle. What will they do when they find out who I am?
“Sir?” the woman pressed.
“It’s 4770 Ring Street, Star City, Iowa.” They’d know it was a false address when they tried to process him, but at least it gave him time to think of some other way to hide.
“Thank you,” said the woman. “You will be processed and interviewed in the order you arrived.” She hit a button on her laptop, and a small printer spat out a plastic label with the number 11874. She stuck it firmly to a bracelet and snapped it around his arm. “Do not lose this.”
“Is this an identifying code or a like a ‘take a number’ number?”
“Both.”
“Wow.” Lyle looked at the number again. “What number are you on now?”
“We’re on 463.”
“Wow,” Lyle said again. It’s going to be easier to lose myself in here than I thought. He looked at the squalid camp again. “How does the food work?”
“Army MREs, once a day. Make it last.” She looked at him pointedly. “And get in line early.”
“Gotcha.”
The woman turned to look over his shoulder. “Next!”
“That’s it?” asked Lyle.
The woman glared at him. “What else do you want?”
Lyle stared at the camp, too lost to even answer the question. “I don’t know. How … do they tell each other apart?”
“Hell if I know. Next!”
Lyle stepped away from the table, and the guards ushered him through the gate. He stared at the vast sea of Lyles, trying to comprehend it but it was too big.
Or, he told himself, exactly the right size. He looked at his bracelet number again: 11874. If he played it right, he might never get processed at all. He walked to a Lyle who was leaning against the wall of the factory, and leaned up next to him.
“There were a hundred of us on that truck,” he said, “give or take. How often do the trucks come in?”
“Every day.”
“The same size?”
The man nodded. “Give or take.”
Lyle nodded, watching the crowd. “And how many do they interview?”
“On a good day? Fifty. Most days we’re lucky to do half that.”
Lyle nodded, and tugged on his bracelet. “Do these come off?”
The Lyle by the wall shook his head. “You don’t want to lose that—it’s your only ticket out of here. And anyone farther down the line than you are is going to be awfully interested in taking it away from you.”
“Or they might be willing to trade for it,” said Lyle. “A little bit of their MRE, for jumping a hundred people forward in the line? That’s an easy trade to make.”
The Lyle by the wall raised his eyebrow. “Are you crazy? You’ll never get out of here.”
“That,” said Lyle, “is exactly the point.”
50
Friday, November 23
1:23 A.M.
An abandoned warehouse in New Jersey
21 DAYS TO THE END OF THE WORLD
“Congratulations,” said Larry. “You’ve raised the most pathetic army the world has ever seen.” Their entire band of revolutionaries had gathered together for an announcement—tie-dyed potheads, wrinkled hippies, tattooed vegan goths with more piercings than skin. Seventy-four forgotten, angry people who only fit in with each other.
Larry hated them.
“Try to get over it,” said Susan, leaning against their van. “This movement is bigger than the people in it.”
“For the record,” said Larry, “I also hate calling it a movement. It’s like we’re pooping out justice.”
“Wait,” said Tony/Fabio. “Isn’t that why we call it a movement? Now I’m disappointed.”
“We need revolutionaries,” said Larry, “not … hippies.”
“These are both,” said Susan. “Everyone we recruited knows this is a war, and they’re ready to fight.”
“They’re tree huggers,” said Tony/Fabio.
Susan shook her head. “They’re more likely to spike a tree than hug it.”
“Fine,” said Larry, “we have our revolution, and then we’re done with them. Only a raging idiot would want to let that pack of Communist baristas rebuild anything resembling a government.”
“The new world’s going to have Communist baristas in it, too,” said Susan. “You may as well just get used to it.”
“As long as they stay baristas and not politicians.”
“You’re not a politician, either,” said Tony/Fabio, “you’re a hired gun. Who says you get to make all the important decisions?”
; “I’m not saying I do,” said Larry, “I’m just saying that they’re idiots. And they’re Socialists, which is redundant.”
“We never used to fight,” said Tony/Fabio with mock sadness. “I think you liked me better as a woman.”
“I think I liked you better as a prisoner,” said Larry.
“Let’s get this meeting started,” said Susan. She walked to the front of the group and shouted for their attention. “All right!” she said. “Eyes up here.” The room quieted. “It’s time for the next phase—we’ve built our revolution, we’ve laid all the groundwork, and now it’s time to make it happen. We want change!”
The group shouted back in agreement.
Susan ticked off each point on her fingers. “We want the government to change. We want their policies to change. We want their vision to change. We want their attitude to change. But more than anything, more than anything in the whole world, we want ReBirth to change. We want it to disappear. We want every last drop of it destroyed.”
The crowd murmured their approval, and Susan paced back and forth, stoking their anger. “Kuvam calls this a world without fear, but I’m still afraid. He calls this a world without death, but people are dying every day. You know what I call this? A world without meaning. A world without logic. There are five million Lyles is this world now, and nobody knows where they’re coming from. There are nearly thirty million other victims, in thousands of makes and models. Nobody knows if they’re going to wake up one morning as somebody else—as Lyle, or as Victoria Carver, or as some half-dead cancer boy in a corrupt government takeover.”
The crowd cheered even louder at this—if there was one thing Larry and the hippies shared, it was a passionate distrust of the government.
“Today,” said Susan, “I’m going to introduce you to the next phase of our plan. We tried to scare them, to show them how terrifying a world with ReBirth can truly be, but they’re not scared. They think they can’t be scared—that their ReBirth factories and their hazmat suits and their ivory towers can keep them safe, but we’re going to show them. Bring him out.”