by Chris Weitz
As the Uptowners start to push in, the twins get to it, cracking heads, but they’re soon tackled. I see Peter swarmed by a couple of camouflaged bros, and then Jefferson gets up and holds my hand. In his other, a pistol.
I kiss him, hard. He kisses back. Then I look at the gun. “End it,” I say.
Jefferson puts the pistol to my head. And I figure, why not? Why not by his hand? I laugh, because we could have saved a lot of time if he had just killed me the first time we met, on the subway platform.
I look into his eyes. Let it come.
Suddenly, we hear a hullabaloo from outside—“Look! Holy shit!”—and Jefferson lowers the gun. I figure, Ah, somebody’s seen the white tails of our ICBMs off to do their business of eliminating humanity.
But that’s not it, either. I hear an English accent, amplified.
“Attention. Vacate the area immediately, or we will fire. Vacate the area.”
I have no time to figure this out before Evan appears in front of us, smiling. There’s another guy with him, whose name must be Chapel, because that’s what Jefferson shouts—
—at just about the same time that Evan clocks me with a right cross and I tumble backward.
It’s not the first time he’s hit me, but it’s one of the hardest, and I feel the cotton wool filling up my brain as I taste blood in my mouth.
The rest is a little hazy. I hear some shots and then the brrrrap of some kind of gun that I’m not familiar with. Kids are falling and running and screaming, and then the store fills with smoke pouring out of a little black canister.
An Uptowner dude stands over me and raises a big aluminum bat. And, in the old slowing-down-of-time thing that would appear, actually, to be what happens before you die, I can read the brand, Mikasa, in angular blue lettering along the side as it hangs in the air…
But before he’s got a chance to bludgeon me, a strange little guy appears out of the smoke, brandishing a kind of curvy machete thing, and chops the dude’s hand off. The bat clangs on the ground with the disembodied fist still gripping the handle.
Well, that’s odd.
The Uptowner dude is screaming about his hand until another, much bigger guy—like, professional-wrestling size—steps up and bashes him in the face, and he goes unconscious.
“You awright, miss?” the big guy asks.
Now the thing about this guy? He’s not just big. He’s old. Like, thirty years old.
“Where is it?” says the voice I heard over the loudspeaker, only this time it’s coming from the source, a square-jawed English guy in what, judging from the gray blocky print, appears to be urban-warfare camo.
Then I guess I start hallucinating, because who should I see but Donna, same shitty haircut but with a few extra pounds. Like, not quite as teenage boyish as before. Like she’s been living it up someplace.
She’s got a bunch of soldiers with her, some of whom are little sparkpluggy guys with sickles, like the one who just saved my bacon. The other half are more big, pasty white dudes.
Lastly, there’s a copper-skinned guy with a less military air than the rest. Jeez, I thought I was pretty. Dude is hot.
At about this point, the events of the past few weeks—bushwhacking my way back from the island, escaping from the UN, going to ground in Midtown, trying to murder my brother—start to take their toll on me. I’m not usually the fainting type, but can you blame me? Days of ditch water and expired protein bars. Fortunately, I get that swimmy feeling before it happens, so I have a moment before the dissolve sets in. Quick, think of something pithy.
“Welcome to New York,” I say, and crumble.
JUST BEFORE MY OLD FRIENTAGONIST Kath collapses onto the floor, Rab, never missing a chance to be swoony, makes a grab for her and lowers her down gently. Jefferson also looks like he’s about to fall over, but I’m not sure Rab is going to rush to his aid, so I take it upon myself. He falls into my arms—not in a Harlequin romance sort of way, more in a ton of bricks sort of way. I practically throw out my back holding him up. It wasn’t quite what I had in mind—I was envisioning more of a wind-machine, Rihanna video kind of thing. Still. It feels like every cell in my body is suddenly flooded with warmth, as though each little mitochondrion suddenly got a case of the feels. I burrow my cheek into the crook of his neck, breathe him in.
I help Jeff over to one of the weirdly preserved wooden display tables in the store.
Jefferson: “You’re here.”
Me: “Yes.”
I had been figuring our reunion would be a little more romantic, like I’d say, I’ve traveled across oceans of time and defied death to find you, or something, and he’d say, I knew my love would draw you back to me, or something, but in the moment “You’re here” and “Yes” just about covers it. Anyhow, we’ve played this scene before. There’s nothing worth saying that you don’t already know. Just our being here is enough. Besides, there is one teeny-tiny pressing issue.
Me: “Do you have it, Jeff? The biscuit.”
Jefferson: “Brainbox.”
Something about the way he says it…
Reza, the squad medic, is over by BB. He performs a few last chest compressions, seemingly for my benefit. Or you could look at it as a ritual, to appease the god of his craft.
I hear a last gust of air escape, a ghostly wheeze, but I know that it’s the breath that Reza just forced into him.
I sit down next to Brainbox and take his hand. It’s cold as clay.
Go to SeeThrough, I say in my head.
The squaddies confer with Wakefield. Sounds like the biscuit is no place to be found.
Wakefield: “It’s time to go, Miss Zimmerman.”
Me: “We take him, too.” I mean Brainbox.
Wakefield: “I understand why you’re saying that, but—”
Me: “If he doesn’t go, I don’t.”
Wakefield looks to Guja, clearly calculating the cost/benefit of hog-tying me as opposed to carrying Brainbox out with us.
Wakefield: “Take the body, Sergeant.”
THERE’S A MOMENT, AFTER THE BRITS and the little guys have arrived, when I have a bead on him. I’m on my back, but I pull myself up and hold out the pistol. And there, over the gun sight, I see Chapel prying the biscuit from Brainbox’s hands.
He looks up and sees me but says nothing—or if he does say anything, it’s whirled up in the echoes and screams and reports around us.
And I can’t pull the trigger.
Why? Not because I love him. I hate him just as much.
Can it be because I’m still hoping we’ll get back together? Pathetic. Maybe if I had time to think rationally, I would shoot him. But in a moment, I lose him in the traffic of bodies, and then the chance is gone.
I just lie back down, letting the party go on for a little bit without me. The twins rouse themselves and help Kath back into consciousness. Soldiers search the store. Jeff and Donna sit by Brainbox’s body, crying.
Later, when I have gathered up a few shards of my self-respect, I sidle up to Donna.
“It’s been like forever, girl. How you been?” I say it like we’ve been on different vacations or something.
Donna laughs. It’s a charity laugh. “You know, this and that.” She takes a breath. “Are we gonna talk about Brainbox?”
“Not yet.” She understands. We do this. Put it aside, let it cool down. And speaking of cooling down… “Who’s the hot guy?”
“Oh, him,” she says. “That’s Rab.”
“Hmm.” I look at her face. “How long you been hitting that?”
She stares daggers. She knifes me with her eyes. “Sonofabitch. Don’t tell Jefferson.”
“Girrrl…” This is some juicy stuff.
“I mean, I’m going to tell him myself. Anyway, that’s over. It was a mistake.”
“If that’s a mistake, I’d love to see you get it right.”
So Donna fills me in on the last few months: imprisonment, transport to England, a new identity, a few months at this fancy-pants uni
versity, all the time getting pumped for information by the Brits. It sounds all tragic the way she tells it, but I’m like, I wish I coulda been seduced and betrayed if it’s like that.
I tell her about the trip from the island back to Manhattan, Brainbox building a bomb out of pigeon poop gathered by yours truly, retaking Washington Square from the Uptowners, the Gathering at the UN, and, finally, Chapel.
“I’m really sorry, Petra.”
“I thought he was the one.”
“Maybe there isn’t a one,” says Donna. “Maybe you get to decide.”
“Yeah, I don’t really have much time to date at the moment. And not everybody meets a soul mate every two minutes.” I look at Rab, who is looking over at us, trying, I guess, to figure out what Donna is saying about him.
“Shut up.” Then, “I really am sorry about Chapel. Not just for the, you know, geopolitical consequences.”
I want to say something like It’s okay, but it isn’t. Nothing is okay about that. It’s pretty much the opposite of okay. It’s yako.
“He used me, Donna,” I say.
“I know them feels,” she says.
I should have shot him. But I couldn’t. Maybe it was that lingering sense of love and affection that, for all its outrageousness, I can still somehow hear over the crazy-making tinnitus of heartbreak and anger. I’m not proud of myself. Chapel killed Brainbox. And I hate him for it. But some part of my brain is still running his app in the background, figuring somehow we might work it all out. And naturally, the first and most vital step in that sequence was my demurring vis-à-vis blowing his brains out.
Surely that counted for something? My doing him a solid like that?
Outside the store, it’s like a video game kill screen, with bodies splayed this way and that, looking that uncool narcoleptic way they do. The British invasion went all Downton Abbey on these fools, and the Uptowners didn’t take a one of ’em along to the big sleep. I feel like it’d be a different story if the fighting weren’t all in the open like this. In the catacombs of the Bazaar, or the mazes of SoHo, the Brits would lose the advantage. But here, the soldiers cleaned house.
One of the gherkins—I think that’s what Donna called them—hefts poor Brainbox in a fireman’s carry, and we hustle behind him in a parade to Central Park. It seems quiet on the street, but I know that the Uptowners are watching, peeping from their high windows, figuring what to do. Homeboys don’t take defeat lightly.
About half a mile into the park, there’s a little encampment around two nasty-looking black helicopters. We stop within a rough circle that’s been hacked into the high grass. A few gherkins are expanding the circle, whacking away with their crazy elbowed knives. The guy in charge, Wakefield, tells them to stop and get ready to move out.
“Not yet. We’re burying our friend,” says Donna.
“No time for that,” says Wakefield.
“So shoot me,” says Donna.
Wakefield looks like he’s thinking about it.
“Have a heart,” says the Cracker Shaq, who seems to have a soft spot for Donna.
Wakefield thinks, says, “I need to debrief the…” He’s about to say prisoners, I think, but he stops himself and says “contacts.”
It’s a standoff until I say, “Don’t worry. I’ll talk. You start with Brainbox, Donna.”
That seems to be a fair compromise, so Jefferson and Donna and the huge guy carry Brainbox over a ways and I stay with the troops.
I’m clearing off some snow from beneath a tree when the Beautiful Bronze One steps up to me.
“Hello,” he says. “My name is Rab. You’ll be Peter.”
Yes I will. I offer him a seat next to me, out of the wind.
“Hi, Rab. You gonna take my briefs off?”
“It’s ‘debrief,’ but I think you know that,” he says.
To be honest, I thought this would throw him, like, the full-on Nelly. I wanted to see how he’d react. He’s smiling. A natural flirt, happy to roll both ways up to a certain point, at least that’s what my gaydar, autobooting out of dormancy, tells me.
I read about this a long time back, when there was this thing called the Internet. Some of these high-class British boys are that way. Like, it’s traditional to be a little gay for each other in boarding school, and then later, when you’re a captain of industry or whatever, you conveniently forget about it.
And a guy like this would’ve had opportunities. But it’s strange; he doesn’t seem like Donna’s type. Then again, when you’re that good-looking, you’re kind of like O-negative blood—universal. I would definitely swipe right on the brother, if you know what I mean.
Okay, actually, I’ve only got eyes for Chapel. I mean I know I’m a guy and all? Like with a broken sex-drive override switch? But I already did the thing where you make up for hurt with sex, what seems like long ago. For now, I’m happy to play the dizzy lovestruck queen with Rab, if it’ll give me an angle on what’s going down.
This is all about the football, of course. The biscuit. The button. The bomb. That’s what they came for, even if they’re pretending to give a shit about the Cure and all of us imperiled young’uns. They being the Brits plus the various lucky and/or rich folks who made it out of the US, backed up by our navy, which more or less runs this bitch vis-à-vis world trade. They could give two shits about us apocalescents. That much I do believe about what Chapel said.
What they can spare some feces for is the Doomsday Car Phone, which was moments ago snatched out of Brainbox’s hands and out of their reach by Chapel and the nastiest bunch of white boys you’d ever want to run screaming from. Seeing Chapel with the Uptowners is pretty much the worst possible version of when your ex starts running with a new crowd.
I give Rab more or less the straight scoop, neglecting to mention the fact that Brainbox had the launch codes memorized. Brother’s dead, why go into it—besides, if they knew that, they’d probably wonder if he had time to write them down. Which he did, or at least, I wrote them down for him. Brother was going in and out of consciousness, though, so who knows how reliable his memory was at that point. I wasn’t about to double-check it on the biscuit, know what I’m saying? I may be a troublemaker on occasion, but I’m not down to start World War III.
Be that as it may, I don’t tell Rab about the folded piece of paper in my back pocket with all those strings of letters.
Chapel has the biscuit now, of course, which means that my ex is the most dangerous man on the planet. Funny thing is, that sort of makes it worse. I know there should be some point where the jealousy kind of shorts out in the face of this evil that is obviously much bigger than just breaking up with me.
But it’s more like if somebody I dated was suddenly starring in a big movie that everybody wanted to go see. Yeah, it makes it hella worse that he’s moved on to bigger and better things like blowing up the planet.
Least, I guess that’s what he might do. Or maybe Chapel wants to use the threat of the bombs to change things, like bring down the government or make things more equal or stuff. Back in the day, when he was recruiting us to help the Resistance, he was all about—if memory serves—“redressing injustice and shattering the hold of the oligarchy on the levers of power” and whatnot. Maybe he really wants to make the world a better place.
Or maybe he just wants to launch everything, fuck things up for real, and clean the slate.
Who knows? One way or another, he shouldn’t have done me like that.
The truth? Just between you and me? Part of me doesn’t even care. I don’t care about the nukes and I don’t care about the politics. All I care is that he’s gone and he doesn’t want me. But whatever he does want, he is definitely holding a big stick.
TITCH MAKES SHORT WORK OF digging the grave, heaving the cold-hardened soil out of the ground in massive clumps. The guy is a beast.
He never met Brainbox, of course, but he knows about him, on account of he must have read my interrogation transcripts. Titch might look like Shrek, all bulk a
nd muscle, but he’s smart and he’s thorough. I reckon (as my Cambridge buddies would say) he’s helping me because he knows Brainbox was one of my tribe, and he still feels guilty toward me for knowing about the whole honeypot scam with Rab. Besides, he understands that BB cured the Sickness, pretty much. We’re burying a hero. But he won’t get a monument. He’ll get a bald patch in Sheep Meadow.
Me: “Titch.” He looks up at me from the hole.
Titch: “Miss.”
Me: “Can you tell me something?” He just looks back at me. “The guy who got the biscuit, Chapel. He said the Reconstruction Committee doesn’t care about us. I mean us ‘kids,’ or whatever you want to call us. He said that you just wanted what was left after you let us all die.”
Titch opens his mouth to say something, but then he thinks better of it. He leans the spade against the side of the grave.
Titch: “I think I dug deep enough, miss,” he says finally. Then he levers himself out of the ground and shuffles off, leaving us “to say words.”
Jefferson and I finish cleaning Brainbox off with surgical wipes. Jeff jumps into the hole, and I help lower in the body. It’s so easy that it’s hard—I mean, like, emotionally speaking. Brainbox is touchingly light. The guy forgot to eat at the best of times. When he was working on a problem, he might go days without a meal.
I stretch my hand down to Jefferson to help him out of the ground. I have to lean back, practically fall, to keep from getting pulled in, and as he steps over the lip of the grave, we crumple into a ball together. It should be intimate; after everything I’ve gone through to get back to him, it should feel like home. But instead, it’s awkward. There’s a distance that we can’t seem to span—not yet at least. Maybe he smells another guy on me. I don’t know.
We stand there looking at Brainbox below the ground as flies land and start to test the waters of his flesh. I want to figure out something to say, something that would make a difference if Brainbox were listening. He would’ve insisted it was pointless, though; he said that consciousness ended at death, so there’s nobody left to care about how you treat them or what you say.