The Revival

by Chris Weitz

  I consider it, a thought refracting through months and miles in the space of a heartbeat. Is it true? Am I just using the memory of Donna, a memory that morphs in the remembering, to keep myself away from the edge of Kath?

  I remember how we met. An embrace on a subway platform. A night on the floor of the Metropolitan. A farewell at the lab as a tear of blood coursed from her eye.

  Here in this back corridor, the sounds of the Uptowners trying to smash their way in have receded. Kath stands there, arms akimbo, hip jutting, her weight planted on one foot, radiating, as she always does, a beauty so blatant it’s practically comical. There are definitely… feelings. And not just physical.

  Maybe Donna really is gone for good. Maybe this weird jumble of emotions that Kath stirs up in me is something like love.

  The last time I saw Donna, I was in the navy chopper, pulling away from the Ronald Reagan, our escape attempt botched. Donna lay on the flight deck looking up, getting smaller as a gout of flame spilled from the fuel hose she had just disconnected, saving the rest of us. I shouted her name, but the chop of the blades ate every other sound.

  Donna wouldn’t give up on me. I know it. She wouldn’t just move on. She’d try to find her way back, or get me out of here.

  “So?” says Kath. Only a moment has passed. We’re still rummaging through the Apple Store, with no way out.

  “So let’s find a way out of here,” I say. She frowns, turns to the door again, and kicks. The door gives way, and hardware spills out of the breach. Inside, a king’s ransom in dead tech but no sign of a back door.

  I go back to the front of the store and check in on Brainbox. He’s awake, his eyes staring up at the ceiling. He mutters to himself, face waxy and slick with sweat. If we don’t get him some help soon…

  Then he looks at me and speaks. “Jefferson. Jefferson.”

  I lean down next to him.

  “BB. I’m here. We’re going to get you help.”

  He seems aware enough of our situation to look around weakly and laugh. It turns into a cough that feels like it’ll rattle him to pieces. “Sure. But in the meanwhile. I have an idea.”

  THE WORLD IS DIMMING AND LOSING its purchase on the firmament resolving to liquid and disappearing through the hole in my stomach like the axis mundi they called it long ago the navel of the world the wormhole from heaven to earth I wonder if as I thought when I was a child when my eyes close for good the whole universe will simply disappear what a surprise it would be for everyone else to find out that they have only been tools and toys of my consciousness but no I realized long ago that the energy and computation required to maintain such an illusion just for me was more than any good efficient and parsimonious reason I could think of for it no the world will go on worlding and people will go on peopling and be about their business of lying cheating killing and stealing as ever and I will not be its experiencer but merely a pair of eyes shut on the monster with fourteen billion eyes but like a shark’s teeth when one breaks another takes its place no if I want to make the childhood daydream come true and wink out the world I must use the biscuit and call forth the holy fire of the sun when they dropped the first bomb it was even hotter than the sun right at the center probably better to have been right there than half a mile away and your skin sliding off your body and hanging like a burial shroud that was the uranium bomb and they had a plutonium bomb and they wanted to see how that would work so they dropped it three days later before the enemy had a chance to surrender which would have prevented the experiment conducted in righteous purpose and turned it into an atrocity which of course it wasn’t it was and it was nothing stacked up against the babies I can summon with the numbers in my head the A-bomb was a match compared to the house fire I can start with the new warheads not to mention the dust choking the atmosphere bringing winter forever I’ll do it what does all this mean to me when I’m gone why should I save them what did they ever do for me but laugh and look sidelong only she only Chrysanthemum ever mattered a single damn and she’s gone where well who knows really she wasn’t even she just a bunch of software on a computer made of meat that thought it was a person and thought it loved a person who was what I think is me really I have already made the decision and just don’t know it I have decided to kill them all because it’s time to move on and wipe creation’s slate clean so that maybe something better might come about but they’ve set down the biscuit way over there a world away five feet away beyond my reach and my graying flesh will not carry me that far so when he appears from the back I say Jefferson I know a way to get help if you give me the biscuit he says why does he suspect that I’m going to do it no Jefferson likes to think the best of people he’d feel it’d be rude to accuse me of wanting to destroy the world but still he’s concerned and so I tell him I can adjust the frequency of the device and send out a distress call whoever it was in those helicopters will receive it and come and he gets a light in his eye the way they always do when I figure something out for them and then I know I have him and he hands me the biscuit and I flip open its keypad cover but the device is dead and I could almost cry at the injustice of it the knife in my hand and the neck of the world beneath it but I cannot make the cut but then I remember where we are and I say get the batteries out of the laptops and bring me tools from the Genius Bar and the back room and they spring to action you can still hear the rattling of the gate as the Uptowners try to get at us I wonder are they clever enough to find the cargo entrance out back or are they just sniffing at their prey like dogs once I had a tribe and for a while I was beloved but only by Chrysanthemum not the rest they just loved the clean water and the working generators and who will they remember when they tell the story of the Cure not me no they will remember Jefferson though he was only the lab rat even he will die when I unleash the fire it is too bad but he had his chance to put it all back together and he failed Chrysanthemum when the nuke hits will my atoms drift with the wind to find yours in the Astor Court and in a million years can something come of the both of us no the odds are against it there are really too many atoms it was much better when it was just a singularity if only I could take us back there rewind time we would touch again but then I would lose you again by unmeeting you and we would be unborn what a waste of energy it all is but then what else does energy have to do than become matter Jefferson hands me the batteries and the tools and I work at them as they hold them gently ease a folded jacket behind my head look to one another with sorrowful sorrow and I am suddenly engulfed by a wave of sympathy and they are just poor witting creatures like me oh my poor people what if I could have felt this connection before why deny me it I look at their faces each suddenly dear will I kill them all I must I must finish this fix it all the light comes on the rubber tiles of the keypad illuminate and I begin there good-bye my friends it is done it is accomplished

  I WATCH THE FREAK, WHO HAS been MacGyvering the satellite phone with laptop batteries, wheezing and twitching with his mad scientist energy. Probably that’s what’s keeping him alive. Maybe he can make himself genuinely useful, fix one of these Macs and fire up an old download of the Kardashians or something. May as well pass the time before my old posse gets through the gate and the end comes.

  Jefferson looks on, smiling and nodding and occasionally offering a low, practically hummed word of encouragement. He looks up from his perch by Brainbox’s feet and smiles at him like everything’s gonna be okay, the eternal optimist.

  Maybe this is why I saved him from the crowd. They would have torn him to pieces, sooner or later.

  Call it love if you like, but really it’s a sort of addiction—and I’ve seen enough junkies to know. Or simply call it a need. I’d save a sandwich from danger if I was hungry. Which I am.

  But starving would beat what’s gonna happen if I fall into the hands of Uptown.

  As if summoned, as if to say, Think of the devil, I hear his voice:

  “Sis. Hey, Sis.”

  It’s coming from under the gate. I look around—everyone e
lse is nursing their wounds, preoccupied with their own shit. The twins are messing around with some ergonomic rubber-ball seat. Peter is lying under a table someplace feeling sorry for himself. Nobody to follow what’s going on.

  I don’t say anything. I just creep toward the voice, trying to see if it can really be him.

  “Sis,” says Evan. “I know you’re there.”

  It’s him. I take the snub-nosed little Mauser from my belt. If I can figure out where he is, and I press the muzzle up close against the gate, maybe it will penetrate and get him.

  “Sis, it hasn’t been the same since you left,” he says. “I miss you.”

  His voice sends me back to the breakfast table, long ago. A burble of traffic from twenty floors below, and Dad was using a newspaper to shield himself from human contact as he ate his paleo pancakes and rolled phone calls, murmuring to his assistant.

  Evan looked up from his iPhone and saw the front page of the New York Times. I knew right away what he was looking at—an article about how the Islamic State was using captured women from some religious minority as sex slaves.

  Evan asked for the newspaper, and Dad lowered it, looking at him.

  “Since when do you read the paper?” asked Dad.

  “I read it online,” said Evan, which was bullshit. Evan never read; he watched, he played.

  “Oh? Who’s the vice president?” said Dad.

  “Um, let me see… Oh, I remember. The vice president is Fuck You. Am I right?”

  Now, usually Dad would have just hauled off and smacked Evan one across the teeth, but lately he’d been tailing off on the domestic violence, since Evan had been getting bigger. Instead, he’d begun cutting down on Evan’s inheritance, like he was assessing penalty yards.

  “That’ll cost you another ten thousand, sport.” He made a point of writing it down with his fountain pen on the creamy card-stock notepad he kept, bound in leather.

  Evan wanted to say something back, escalate the contempt, but he didn’t want to cost himself any more money, so he shut up. To reward his silence—silence had been, for years, what we kids bought things with—Dad gave him the paper when he was done. Call it behavioral conditioning.

  Later, I saw Evan clip the sex slave article carefully, using one of his favorite knives to slit the edges. He put it in the file folder marked cool shit that he’d stolen from his internship at the hedge fund before he got shitcanned for selling coke to the analysts.

  “Jerk-off material for those lonely nights?” I said.

  “Go to hell, whore,” he answered, always ready with a witty retort. Then, as though he hadn’t just insulted me, he confided, “Hey, did you know you can tweet at the Islamic State dudes?”

  “Are you insane?” I said. “The government will track you.”

  “I’m not using my real name, moron,” he said. “I pretend I’m a seeker after truth, disillusioned with our materialistic way of life, thinking of converting to Islam. They love that shit.”

  “What the hell would you want to tweet terrorists for?”

  “It’s fucked up,” he said, as if that were a good enough reason. “I mean, obviously we’ve got to eradicate them and shit. But they do have some good ideas.”

  And I thought, I know the kind of ideas you like. And again I repeated the magical, beautiful word to myself: eighteen. That’s when the trust fund was going to kick in and I could get out, and the law and my parents and Evan couldn’t stop me. And until then, I thought, please God keep Evan from getting the power to do what he wants.

  Well, shit, God. Now you’ve done it. So I’ve decided to do something myself.

  I say, “I’m here, Evan.”

  He sounds genuinely touched. “I knew it. I knew it. I knew you’d never leave me for good.”

  I can feel him near. I reach out the Mauser.

  “Sis,” he says, “listen to me. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking.”

  Probably not a record-breaking amount, I say to myself.

  “Yeah?”

  “Let’s start again,” he says. “I’m sorry for all the stuff I did. If you just open the gate, nobody’s going to hurt you.”

  “Keep talking,” I say. I want to get the aim right.

  “Do you really want to do this?” he says. “Get hunted down like a rat, die in a hole with a bunch of losers? C’mon, open up. I can make you Queen of America.”

  I pull the trigger. BAM! The sound is deafening; my ears crackle with aftershock. As the others try to figure out what’s happening, I pull the trigger again, unload the gun. Not even a bullet left for me.

  Quiet and the smell of gunshots. Jefferson and Peter look up at me, astonished. Abel and Anna run over and cling to me.

  Then through the metal gate comes his laughter. Bubbling up from the silence like swamp gas.

  “Wow,” he says. “I’ll take that as a no, huh? Shit, you killed Mack. You remember him?”

  I do.

  “Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy,” I say.

  “Well, Sis, now you really did it. You’re gonna get the full treatment now. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  And at that, I hear the THUMP of something igniting, and a tongue of brightness pokes through the gate.

  “Shit,” says Peter. “That’s a welding torch.”

  The point of flame spits sparks onto the floor, where they dance around before dying.

  Meanwhile, something is up with the freak.

  “BB? BB?” says Jefferson, his voice unhinging. He’s got the kid’s face in his hands. I go over and look.

  Kid’s dead.

  LOOKY-LOOS KEEP PEEPING from the trees and the long grass, but they flee as the squaddies fire warning shots. I’m trying to talk Wakefield into cutting me loose from the handcuffs, when he turns to speak to Corporal Ayers.

  Wakefield: “What have you got?”

  Corporal Ayers: “It was on our frequency, sir. Just a short burst of Morse code.” The way he says it makes it seem like that’s extremely strange. Wakefield nods, and the squaddie continues.

  Corporal Ayers: “It was a terrible fist, sir. All slurred innit. It’s nothing but long and short bursts of static like. He’s making the signal by interrupting the device’s resting state. Like using static to communicate. It’s actually rather clever.”

  Me: “What’s a ‘fist’?”

  Corporal Ayers: “It’s the way you do the Morse code signals, miss. Everybody’s different. Dots and dashes longer or shorter than usual, spacing, that sort of thing.”

  Wakefield: “What’s the message?”

  Corporal Ayers: “I missed the first couple of signals, but what I’ve got is ‘11-AppleSt-FAO-WS.’”

  Wakefield (turns to me): “I’ve never heard of an Apple Street. Have you?”

  Me: “Oh, am I out of the doghouse?”

  Wakefield: “Kindly answer.”

  Me: “There is no Apple Street. At least, not in Manhattan.”

  Wakefield: “Does any of the rest of it make sense to you?”

  I look at Ayers, who consults his notepad and repeats the message. I turn the letters over in my mind. FAO. Then I know.

  Me: “It’s the Apple Store. FAO is FAO Schwarz. It was a toy store. There was an Apple Store near FAO Schwarz, like right down the street from it. It’s really close, Colonel. We’ve got to go.”

  Wakefield: “Why do we have to go?”

  My entire body is pounding.

  Me: “Because it’s my tribe. My friends. WS is Washington Square. And 11—it’s the end of 911 and you didn’t catch the beginning.”

  I can tell from Wakefield’s face that he’s hooked. But I doubt it’s out of concern for my friends.

  Titch: “That frequency is only military.”

  Wakefield looks up at him and nods. “Could be it.”

  I think he means the signal has to have been sent from the biscuit.

  Me, I know the only member of our tribe who’d be likely to know Morse code. And he happens to be the guy smart enough to figure o
ut how to send a radio message using a doomsday device.

  Brainbox is calling. Which means so is Jefferson.

  JEFFERSON CRADLES HIM LIKE A BABY, tears running down his face. I sure hope he got this worked up when I died.

  Brainbox’s eyes are closed. But he doesn’t look like he’s asleep. He looks like he’s an it. A corpse.

  Whatever was inside is gone and it isn’t coming back, so this is no time to get sentimental.

  “Jeff,” I say. “I know you feel bad, but we’ve got to figure something out, like, now. They’re cutting their way in.”

  Before he can respond, the biscuit starts beeping. I kneel down and pick it up. There’s a shitty little screen, like on an old calculator from the seventies or something, and it reads COMMAND INITIATED.

  Uh-oh.

  “Uh, Jeff?” I say. “I think whatshisface might’ve just started World War Three.”

  Jefferson glares at me. “He wouldn’t do that. You’re crazy.”

  “Crazy is as crazy does,” I say. I feel like I’m a better judge than most. And frankly, not to throw shade on the dead and whatnot, but the kid always struck me as two sandwiches short of a picnic—especially after his waify little girlfriend got her ticket punched by that polar bear. I would absolutely not put it past him to torch the world in, like, the ultimate mad scientist mic drop.

  And Jefferson feels it, too. He doesn’t want to say so, I can tell, but in his mind’s eye I bet he’s seeing the missiles launch, starting the long loops toward Moscow and Beijing.

  As if on cue, we hear a combustible whooshing.

  But it’s not the bombs flying overhead. It’s the sound of the arc welder as the gate is finally breached, a semicircle of pleated metal crashing to the floor, leaving a giant mouse hole. The welding flame sucks up the open air, hissing with satisfaction.

  I have to laugh, because what’s the worst that can happen? No matter how bad things get, the end is near; I figure we have maybe a half hour before the Russians return fire and their nukes dip back into the atmosphere to fry New York.