by Chris Weitz
That’s the signal for the third team, up top.
Jefferson is muttering: Namu amida butsu, namu amida butsu, over and over again. His Buddhist stuff.
Then I hear a crack of distant thunder. A groan of metal, and a closer smashing, like a great wave crashing on a seawall. Dust sprays through the doorway.
Now’s our chance. We rush in, guns raised, to see the famous blue whale, now fallen to the floor from where it hovered fifty feet above. A ninety-foot-long monster of fiberglass and polyurethane, it’s smashed into two jagged pieces by the fall, like a great ship broken upon the rocks. Right on top of the slavers.
Some are still struggling to get out from under it, their legs shattered, screaming. Others are dead, impaled in bizarre poses by huge shards of fiberglass. Anyone left standing is covered in dust and particles, stunned and docile. They drop their guns to the floor, choke, raise their hands in surprise and submission.
A lot of the displays are broken, and girls burst from their pens, some of them seizing guns from the dead and wounded. I try to find Carolyn and the others, wandering through the clouds of dust.
Above, the Slayer Queens make their way to the upper balconies from the roof, which has been blown open by the explosive charge that brought down the whale.
In front of me, a familiar face. A rotund, pleasant-looking boy, his fake beard hanging from one ear, frozen in shock.
“Do you remember me?” I say to him. He looks like a statue, white with dust.
The boy says nothing at first, but then a look comes to his face. Recognition. And panic.
I put my gun to his chest and shoot him. He collapses to the floor.
I’m about to shoot another one of the slavers when Jefferson grabs me. We struggle, then fall to the ground. I look him in the eyes, and for a moment, I feel nothing but defiance, a challenge: Tell me what I did was wrong. Then I burst into tears, and Jefferson holds me and hushes me like a child.
When I look up, I see Rab, standing near, a thin little dagger in his hand. He’s looking at me—or is it Jefferson?
He’s saying, “I can’t. I can’t.”
I want to tell him it’s okay—he can leave all the killing to us. That it’s not a natural thing to do. That, anyway, these slavers are nothing to him. But the fact is, here, he’ll have to get his mind around it. I hope that if it comes down to it, he’ll do what he needs to do.
TITCH’S BLOOD HAS CONGEALED; his eyes have milked over. It’s a mystery—the breath stops and then you’re not you. I can’t help but watch as he turns from a person to a thing, a body without a soul. Where’s it gone? Maybe no place. That’s what Brainbox said anyway.
Me, I was brought up differently: I believe that Titch is in the loving arms of Jesus. Of course, that image is just a metaphor, right? I mean, I can see him right here, so I don’t imagine that there’s also someplace where his real body is in the real hands of JC; that’s just language messing things up, turning ideas into pictures. I can’t help but look at Titch and shudder.
The other choice would be to look at Chapel, but I can’t bring myself to do it. He’s been making eyes at me for a while, like he could explain his betrayal away with sufficiently active eyebrows.
It’s funny because at times I would have given anything to see him again. Now here we are, tied up in the center of the room, and I can’t for the life of me think of anything to say. Maybe it’s hate. Maybe it’s love. Maybe it’s the concussion.
“Peter.” It’s Chapel, who’s finally managed to spit the rag out of his mouth.
I don’t say anything.
“Peter. Look at me.”
No dice. “You betrayed me. You betrayed all of us.”
“You don’t know the whole story.”
Great. So next I’m supposed to say, Then tell me the whole story, all skeptical-sounding. But I don’t feel like it. Even though I want to hear his voice.
“No more stories,” I say. He knows what I mean. The story he had me believing in, where he loved me, and me and him were going to ride into the post-apocalyptic sunset.
But he starts telling his story anyway, and I don’t have my hands free to block my ears, and it seems silly to drown him out by humming or whatever.
“Remember something,” he says. “It wasn’t me who screwed up Jefferson’s Gathering.”
“It was your Gathering. Your idea.”
“No. I just knew what Jefferson wanted. That’s all.”
I can’t disagree. It was Jefferson who always dreamed of Utopia. Like you could make lemonade out of apocalypse lemons, or a new society out of the secondhand pieces of what was left after What Happened. So he went hook, line, and sinker for Chapel’s suggestion of a Gathering of the Tribes.
“I was right about the Gathering,” he says. “Look what’s happened. What little social cohesion there was in this godforsaken place is going out the window.”
“Don’t pretend you care about that. All you care about is the nukes.”
“They’re the only way anybody here is going to live out the year. Trust me.”
I look away from him, at the smashed mirror above the bar. Try to keep from crying. His body is warm against mine.
“That’s funny,” I say. “Trust you.”
“Listen to me. This is all part of a plan. But if you don’t help me get free, everyone is going to die. The Reconstruction is going to invade and liquidate the population.”
“You’re full of shit,” I say. “Before, you said that they were going to leave us alone to die.”
“Yes, before. Now they have a reason to come. Oh, they’ll spare a few hundred, use them for medical stock. The rest of you they’ll kill before you can do any more harm.”
“What harm are we doing?” I say. I’ve had about enough of this bullshit from Chapel. Had about enough of the adults and what they want. Not for the first time, I wish we had never left Washington Square, hadn’t gotten mixed up in this whole story.
I struggle against the bonds; the metal chairs creak but don’t give.
“Do you know how the Reconstruction kept from getting infected, Peter?”
I don’t. I figured they had a Cure, like us. But maybe that’s not it.
“Quarantine…”
“No,” says Chapel. “That was just a tiny part of it. Only for those who’d made it once everyone else had been taken care of.”
I don’t like the sound of “taken care of.” It tends to mean the exact opposite.
“They shot them out of the sky, Peter. The airliners.”
“How many?”
“All of them. Anything from the US. Then they blew up the ships—all the long-haul freighters. They missed things, here and there. There was an outbreak in Muscat, in Oman. A freighter had gotten through in error. Cases reported at local clinics.”
His face twitches before he regathers his composure and tells me, “They nuked it, Peter. They cauterized it. Six hundred thousand people. A human firebreak.”
I look at him. Try to find out if he’s telling me the truth. Was this how he looked when he told me he loved me?
“I just want you to know the kind of people we’re dealing with, so you’ll understand what we’ve done.”
God.
“What do you mean? What have you done? What?”
“We’ve had to even the playing field, Peter. If we didn’t, they’d do the same here. Blow this city up, just to make sure that your Cure couldn’t spread.”
God.
“You’re insane. Why wouldn’t they want the Cure to spread?” He’s said this kind of thing before, but I never bothered to question it because I was in love, which makes you stupid, I guess.
“Two reasons,” says Chapel. “One, you’re all incredible pains in the ass. Nobody wants to deal with a whole country full of teens. Two, you’re all little breeding grounds for the virus.”
“But the Cure—”
“It works for a while, Peter. But there’s a phenomenon called antigenic shift.”
&n
bsp; I remember that phrase from the Ronald Reagan. Every time they took blood from us, they explained it was because of antigenic shift. But if you asked what that was, they said it was classified.
“Antigenic shift. When a virus mutates in the wild through genetic recombination. Usually, it’s due to a leap from one species to another. But this one…” He means the Sickness. “We were able to tease a few new strains into existence. All it takes is a couple of people with the virus. If you’ve already had it and been cured, you’re safe. If not, and you have last year’s Cure, you’re a sitting duck.”
It takes me a while to figure this out. “You mean…”
“We needed to level the playing field, Peter.”
I feel sick to my stomach.
“You didn’t do it,” I said.
“It wasn’t just me doing it, Peter,” he says. “Something like this takes a whole network of people. Hundreds. Thousands. And understand, these people are risking their lives.”
“You infected the whole world.” I can barely contain the idea.
“We did. Over a hundred agents, in over a hundred cities. By now, there’s no way to quarantine it.”
I can’t breathe.
“It was the only way. The only way to save people. You understand? There are millions of kids left. Here, the rest of the country, all the way down south to Tierra del Fuego. The only way to save everyone is for everyone to be in the same boat.”
“Everyone’s infected…” I say to myself. I remember the chaos. The electricity going down. The food running out. Society rupturing.
“Nobody needs to die, Peter. The symptoms are only starting to show now. And they can develop cures for each of the strains. But to do that, they’ll need your blood.”
“My blood?”
“Who do you think we got it from? You and your friends. That’ll be our export, Peter. The genetic information they need to make cures. In return, the rest of the world keeps us supplied, until we can set the country on its feet again. But none of this works unless we have the means to defend ourselves. That’s why we need the football.”
I understand. I’m not saying I agree. I’m saying I understand the idea. We have the Cure. We have the nukes. We need something to trade. And it’s us. Part of us, anyway.
“Brainbox,” I say. “You killed Brainbox.”
“I shot Brainbox. I didn’t mean to kill him. But he was trying to stop me from doing what I had to do, for the good of everyone else. I regret it. I wish that I had had time to explain. He wasn’t well, Peter. He wasn’t in his right mind. You know that yourself. And he had his hands on the nuclear codes and the football. I had to stop him.”
I do remember how strange Brainbox was in the last days, how withdrawn and cold he had been since SeeThrough died. I wasn’t there, to know if Chapel was telling the truth. But I do know that, with his last breaths, Brainbox didn’t use the biscuit to hurt anyone. He used it to get help for his friends.
What can I do now, though? Now that I know. If the rest of the world is infected… If Evan still has the nukes… What can I do but help Chapel?
“Peter,” he continues, “I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you this before. I swore an oath. And nothing could make me break it, not even how I feel about you.”
I push that thought from my mind. A last question occurs to me.
“Why?” I say. “Why do this for us?”
“Not just you,” says Chapel. “All of us. Everybody who never had a chance. ‘Your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.’ Do you know that poem? It was written by an American, Emma Lazarus. It’s inscribed inside the Statue of Liberty. There are plenty of people who need land, and space, and resources, and they’re willing to help a young country—a literally young country—get on its feet.”
WHEN MY EARS CLEAR, I hear Imani, arrived from the front entrance, supervising her soldiers as they smash more of the diorama façades. Some of the captives need coaxing out, since all hope of rescue seemed to have evaporated before now, and it’s hard for them to believe that we are not bringing some further torment to inflict on them. But here and there a familiar face, altered by time and hunger, appears, and we get our tribeswomen to reassure the others.
The girls we free from the ocean dioramas tell us there are more, many more, and we make our way through the vast building, making slow progress through the dark, doubling back again and again, interpreting the blueprint by flashlight and lighter.
The Hall of Mexico and Central America… the Hall of African Peoples… the Hall of Plains Indians. We work our way through all of them.
We come to a hall with two levels of dioramas and a herd of taxidermied elephants in the middle, the bull’s trunk extended in a silent call. The slavers make their last stand here, and the elephants are gradually pocked with new bullet holes (the original ones were, presumably, repaired).
From behind the dead wildlife, the surviving people emerge blinking, crying, tearless, voiceless, screaming. Finally, we have a parade of hundreds.
The Uptowners are next.
Carolyn, Donna, and I make a tally of our tribe members: Kristy, Shannon, Ayesha, Olivia, all three of our Ashleys. More and more. It starts to feel like a victory and not just a slaughter the farther we get away from the gruesome room with the blue whale spattered with blood.
“You took long enough,” says Carolyn as she helps some girls out from where they were hiding behind a pair of black rhinos.
“I did,” I admit. “I’m sorry.”
“We thought you were dead when things broke up at the UN,” she says. “Glad you’re not.”
“For now,” I say. For all I know, we may be joining the black rhinos soon enough.
We’ve lost a single fighter, a tall girl named Lanita. She is laid in state on a wooden bench in the Hall of African Peoples, beneath a Zulu chief’s cowhide shield, with a knobkerrie and assegai at her side. The freed girls pass by in a silent line, each touching her face in a grateful tribute before moving on.
In the very last room we search, we find some old friends. Tricia and Sophie, who we knew as Psychedelic Cowgirl and Morticia. At first, we miss them because, with their usual aplomb in matters of clothing, they have torn off the hides of the buffalo they were penned up with and turned them into warm ponchos.
“OMFG,” says Cowgirl.
“WTAF,” says Morticia.
“’Sup, Buffalo Girls,” says Donna. “Won’t you come out tonight?”
In the shadow of the herd of elephants, we try to decide what to do next.
Imani, flashing a rare smile, is all for keeping the momentum. “I say we roll on, take out the Uptowners. They’re slippin’ anyhow; that’s what I hear.”
“You won’t get any argument from me,” I say. “Let’s hook up with our friends.” I’ve been avoiding contact for now, not wanting to give Peter and the others away with a transmission at the wrong time.
“Only—I’m after something in particular.”
Imani looks at me skeptically. “Go on.”
I’ve been wondering what I would tell Imani, but the possibility of getting killed before it was even an issue had allowed me to punt the question downfield. Now I can either lie to her or give her information that could end up, if she plays her cards right, making her the most powerful person in the world.
There’s the way Chapel played it. There’s the way I played it before, when I knew the most important thing there was to know—I lied to Imani and everyone else.
So I decide to do the opposite.
“The Uptowners have a device,” I say, “that controls the US nuclear arsenal.”
Imani blinks.
“Okay,” she says. “Explain.”
So I do.
Or at least, I get partway in before Rab’s walkie-talkie chirps.
“Come in,” says Rab as we cluster around him.
Evan’s voice comes over the line.
“To whom am I speaking?�
�� The precision and formality of a true sadist.
“How did you get this?” says Rab. But I already know the answer. It’s the channel we agreed on with Titch.
“I got it from your pet giant,” says Evan. “Afraid he didn’t survive the procedure.”
Donna gasps and covers her mouth. She steps back, presumably to keep Evan from hearing her cry.
“Yeah, he took quite a while to finish off. Guy had a lot of guts. Anyhow. Let’s talk.”
“What about the others? Is Peter alive?”
“Is that the queer? Yeah, he’s still kicking, for now. The other Brit is gone, though.”
“I need proof that he’s alive.”
“Well, I would only give you proof if I wanted something from you. But I don’t.”
“You do,” I say. “You do want something.”
“What’s that, Jeff?”
“You want to kill me.” Donna looks at me like I’m crazy.
“All in good time,” says Evan. “Remember, it’s not really up to me. It’s up to the guy in the sky.”
Kath grabs the walkie from Rab.
“Evan?” she says.
“Oh, hi, Sis,” says Evan.
“Evan, listen to me. If you let Peter go, I’ll let you go.”
“Let me go?”
“Yes. Instead of putting you down. Like I plan to.”
“Words are air, Sis. Nice try, though. You’ve got balls. You should have been a dude. Well, gotta go. I’ll be in touch.”
WELL, THAT WAS FUN. I wish I could be there and just watch them, just enjoy the utterly fucked expressions on their faces.
Me and the boys are moving out, heading along a damp, smelly maintenance corridor.
In a way, it’s a shame I can’t wait for them to arrive, which they will no doubt do, being the kind of friend-rescuing dickheads they are.
I wonder, for a second, if anybody would rescue me.
Maybe not.
Still, I’d trade any amount of palling around and shooting the shit for the feeling I have now, being on top of it all, kicking ass and taking names. Am I lonely? Sure. But we all are.
Gunfire from up top. That’ll be the old folks, either the Russians or the Chinese, depending on who got here first. They’ve come for the football, of course. Oh, they’ll probably wrap it up in some bullshit, like they’re trying to prevent catastrophe, or save us from ourselves, or something, but when it comes down to it, they want the power and they don’t want anybody else to have it.